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Comment by ProfChronos | Hacker News Reader

While reading the wikipedia article, I couldn't help thinking about two things: - the Big Lebowski scene when Walter jumps on the Dude's attempt to quote Lenin and mixes Lenin with Lennon - one thing I recently read about natural language processing [1]: "NLP began in the 1950s as the intersection of artificial intelligence and linguistics. (...) Early simplistic approaches, for example, word-for-word Russian-to-English machine translation,2 were defeated by homographs—identically spelled words with multiple meanings—and metaphor, leading to the apocryphal story of the Biblical, ‘the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak’ being translated to ‘the vodka is agreeable, but the meat is spoiled.’ [1]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3168328/

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> ‘the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak’

Even when humans in western world translate from languages like Sanskrit or Japanese they totally fail to understand the context that is so obvious to native speaker of those languages. Japanese quickly understand the Sanskrit word 'Namaste' ("I bow to you") but western scholars tends to replace it as "Hello" which it isn't. Hello (accounts vary) comes from Old High German word halâ, holâ which is a cry to seek attention of a boatman.

When translating a story from say Sanskrit to English, if we replace each instance of Hello with 'I bow to you', the story might becomes less readable for western audience and replacing it with "Hello" might sound consistent but it simply fails to capture the culture from which the word is originated.

My knowledge of Sanskrit is limited but when I first read about `Sage Dirghatamas` who is the father of meditation is often translated by western scholars as "Dirgha-Tamas" => "enveloped in perpetual darkness" => The man was probably blind. To their credit there are several stories that mention Dirgha-Tamas as born blind.

But even as a novice scholar of Sanskrit I was quickly able to see that Drigha-Tamas => "man staring into infinite darkness" => Very Very contemplative man. The "born blind" is mere a metaphor for someone who is very closed to out experiences and focused on his inner experiences.

interesting mention of "namaste" - in many cultures the origin of words no longer play a part in their meaning anymore, but i don't know if this applies to namaste

'goodbye' has no religious interpretation. neither does 'jesus christ' as an exclamation - as far as i know both believers and nonbelievers use the term.

even something as recent as 'hi how are you' - you may be given this greeting in london, and the appropriate reponse is not an answer but also 'hi how are you'.

> in many cultures the origin of words no longer play a part in their meaning anymore

Even though that might be true the original meaning tells a lot about the culture. Ignoring that leads to cultural appropriation (I hate that phrase). For example "God damn" is a modern slang which is probably not even considered a slang but few centuries ago it was an extremely serious slang with serious repercussions. I don't think that phrase and its meaning can be translated in polytheistic dominated languages like Sanskrit. A cool example is that when as a Hindu I find it completely normal to worship Goddess of death I often find even non religious Christians finding it disgusting.

Mother Kali is very cool :-)

I think my favorite, though, is Akhilandeshvari. Just thinking about her brings tears to my eyes.

(I know only what little I've read about them. I'm not a practicing Hindu. Maybe I was in a past life :-)

Thanks, had no idea "goodbye" came from "God be with you" [1].

1: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/goodbye

yes, "hello" can be traced back to older forms of "attention seeking hollers", but the popular currency of the modern hello came about because it was the greeting chosen for the telephone. I believe the original suggestion was to answer the phone with "ahoy!"

> ‘the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak’ being translated to ‘the vodka is agreeable, but the meat is spoiled.’

This is great!

The way I heard it: "out of sight, out of mind" translated to "invisible idiot."

Great stories, yet urban legends both (even though the problem of context in natural language processing is very real).

Worst offence I've ever seen: http://img1.liveinternet.ru/images/attach/c/2//64/152/641522...

(Squirrel and protein are homographs in russian, although in different forms).

LOL! I would have had no idea. I'm scared of Google Translate now.

Tangent; "lightning"/"flash"/"blinking" in Mandarin is easily misspelled (mandarin keyboard input is phonetic) to a word that sounds similar, but means "hernia".

Hence, you can find thousands of images of "hernia lamp" with google.

https://www.google.se/search?q=hernia+lamp&client=safari&hl=...

Apt reference, but to be clear, it is Donny who jumps on the Dude's attempt to quote Lenin, and Walter who scornfully corrects him, "V.I. Lenin-- Vladimir Ilyich ULYANOV!"

Walter wasn't wrong, he was just... you know.

You're right, I just wrote too fast, I meant what you wrote!

The original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eDOJ4L0Edk

leading to the apocryphal story of the Biblical, ‘the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak’ being translated to ‘the vodka is agreeable, but the meat is spoiled.’

Not long ago, Google translate was still doing the translation that way. It's since been fixed, probably by using a special case.

Still does for some languages. Just last week I was looking for the lyrics to "I'm a Little Teapot" in Japanese, and the translate suggestion was watashi wa sukoshi tiipotto desu: "I am slightly teapot."

(As to the search, it seems that unlike many nursery rhymes, I'm a Little Teapot has not been imported.)

This is even worse when translating to another language than English because it use English as a pivot thus adding another layer of errors.

I noticed it first when translating to French a sentence and a Japanese word meaning 'to book (an hotel)' was translated as a word meaning a book (livre).

I would have thunk that an Easter Egg.

NLP in Russian stands for "NeuroLinguistic Programming" (of gullible masses, of course)

"Natural Language Processing" intended here. Alas, the pigeonhole principle meets TLAs again ;)

THANK YOU FOR THAT LINK

I've been wondering for 30 years if I'd ever hear that story again.

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