[Wikimedia-l] The case for supporting open source machine translation

[Mathieu Stumpf]

Le 2013-04-26 17:00, Gerard Meijssen a écrit :
> Hoi,
> When we invest in MT it is to convey knowledge, information and 
> primarily
> Wikipedia articles. They do not have the same problems poetry has. 
> With
> explanatory articles on a subject there is a web of associated 
> concepts.
> These concepts are likely to occur in any language if the subject 
> exists in
> that other language.
>
> Consequently MT can work for Wikipedia and provide quite a solid
> interpretation of what the article is about. This is helped when the
> associated concepts are recognised as such and when the translations 
> for
> these concepts are used in the MT.
> Thanks,
>       GerardM

I think that poetry just make a easy to grab example of the more 
general problem of "lexical/meaning" intrication which will appears at 
some point. Different cultures will have different conceptualizations of 
what one may perceive. So this is not just a matter of concept sets, but 
rather of concept network dynamics, how concepts interacts within a 
world representation. And interaction means combinatorial problems, 
which require paramount ressources.

Those said, I agree that having MT to help "adapt" articles from one 
language/culture to an other one would be useful.

>
>
> On 26 April 2013 10:38, Mathieu Stumpf 
> <psychoslave at culture-libre.org>wrote:
>
>> Le 2013-04-25 20:56, Theo10011 a écrit :
>>
>>  As far as Linguistic typology goes, it's far too unique and too 
>> varied to
>>> have a language independent form develop as easily. Perhaps it also
>>> depends
>>> on the perspective. For example, the majority of people commenting 
>>> here
>>> (Americans, Europeans) might have exposure to a limited set of a
>>> linguistic
>>> branch. Machine-translations as someone pointed out, are still not
>>> preferred in some languages, even with years of research and 
>>> potentially
>>> unlimited resources at Google's disposal, they still come out 
>>> sounding
>>> clunky in some ways. And perhaps they will never get to the level 
>>> of
>>> absolute, where they are truly language independent.
>>>
>>
>> To my mind, there's no such thing as "absolute" meaning. It's all 
>> about
>> intrepretation in a given a context by a given interpreter. I mean, 
>> I do
>> think that MT could probably be as good as a profesional 
>> translators. But
>> even profesional translators can't make "perfect translations". I 
>> already
>> gave the example of poetry, but you may also take example of humour, 
>> which
>> ask for some cultural background, otherwise you have to explain why 
>> it's
>> funny and you know that you have to explain a joke, it's not a joke.
>>
>>
>>  If you read some of
>>> the discussions in linguistic relativity (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), 
>>> there
>>> is
>>> research to suggest that a language a person is born with dictates 
>>> their
>>> thought processes and their view of the world - there might not be
>>> absolutes when it comes to linguistic cognition. There is something
>>> inherently unique in the cognitive patterns of different languages.
>>>
>>
>> That's just how learning process work, you can't "understand" 
>> something
>> you didn't experiment. Reading an algorithm won't give you the 
>> insight
>> you'll get when you process it mentaly (with the help of pencil and 
>> paper)
>> and a textual description of "making love" won't provide you the 
>> feeling it
>> provide.
>>
>>
>>
>>  Which brings me to the point, why not English? Your idea seems 
>> plausible
>>> enough even if your remove the abstract idea of complete language
>>> universality, without venturing into the science-fiction labyrinth 
>>> of
>>> man-machine collaboration.
>>>
>>
>> English have many so called "non-neutral" problems. As far as I 
>> know, if
>> the goal is to use syntactically unambiguous human language, lojban 
>> is the
>> best current candidate. English as an international language is a 
>> very
>> harmful situation. Believe it or not, but I sometime have to 
>> translate to
>> English sentences which are written in French, because the writer 
>> was
>> thinking with English idiomatic locution that he poorly translated 
>> to
>> French, its native language in which it doesn't know the idiomatic
>> locution. Even worst, I red people which where where using concepts 
>> with an
>> English locution because they never matched it with the French 
>> locution
>> that they know. And in the other way, I'm not sure that having 
>> millions of
>> people speaking a broken English is a wonderful situation for this 
>> language.
>>
>> Search "why not english as international language" if you need more
>> documentation.
>>
>>
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>> Association Culture-Libre
>> http://www.culture-libre.org/
>>
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