Comment by bserge | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bserge | Hacker News Reader

Comeback? Has it ever been more than a niche curiosity?

It's more like translation tools will make a comeback. Already have.

They've gotten so good, you don't even need to learn a new language to learn something that's only available in English (or other languages).

Incidentally, this was a major reason I learned English. There was so much more information available back in the early 00's that I just had to do it.

Romanian Internet was... abysmal. Thankfully, I knew Russian, and their Internet activity was far better. Lots of information and software. But that paled in comparison to the English Internet.

At the moment, I find the Chinese Internet very active and interesting, even though translation is pretty poor and sadly, the language is very difficult. Plus, I don't have a real incentive to learn it.

I don't know what part of the culture makes people write and share information, but some countries definitely have less of this activity. Perhaps it's just raw numbers, more people = more content.

With Google Translate and the like, it has become much easier to access all of it, any kind of information, the best content.

> Comeback? Has it ever been more than a niche curiosity?

There was actually a fair amount of momentum behind Esperanto in the 1920s. The League of Nations seriously considered adopting it as their official language of business and was also considering recommending that member states include Esperanto in their educational curricula. The only real opposition was from the French, who wanted to preserve their language as the language of diplomacy, and vetoed these proposals.

But by the late 1930s that momentum had faded away and totalitarian governments (particularly Germany and the Soviet Union) began to suppress Esperanto.

They've gotten so good, you don't even need to learn a new language to learn something that's only available in English

It's a mixed bag really. Japanese is still too foreign for Google Translate to interpret properly outside of common phrases.

I find automatic translation from English to Portuguese very good, but those are not that different from each other. What is the state of automatic translation between two languages that are very far and different from each other like Chinese (a sino-tibetan language) and English (an indo-european language)? I thought that ML and all the recent research on that could close the gap in this regard even for such very distant languages.

I use it everyday, and actually Japanese to English is pretty good in Google translate. Japanese to French was abysmally bad a few years back, but now it became acceptable.

The opposite translations are not bad per-se, but the sentences are always non-natural because all the context and articles that are implicit in Japanese are kept.

> Perhaps it's just raw numbers, more people = more content.

Definitely not that… Some languages with less speakers generate more content than others with more speakers. It's cultural. It's not just Internet, if you look for science fiction novels for example you'll find more in Polish or German than in Portuguese, even though the latter has far more speakers.

Don't expect to learn Scots from the World Wide Web, thanks to the goings on at the Scots language Wikipedia and all of the mirrors and automatic translators that have used it as source material.

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