First AI model that translates 100 languages without relying on English

That may be true to some extent if you really push the philosophy angle, but I'd say real world is much simpler than that. There's stuff that happened, and there are consequences - just because the consequences may not be fully computable in the amount of time and effort anyone is willing to expend on it, doesn't mean truth suddenly becomes fuzzy. The territory is sharp, it's just the map that's uncertain. But for that, the proper words are "I'm not sure", not "I have my truth, you have yours".

> So for example, do I forgive nuclear power and GM food companies from trying to influence public discourse on the safety of their work? Of course, it's essential in a world where they are competing against lots of unwarranted negative attention, much of it baseless as far as the science goes.

And because of what I wrote above, I despise both. Yes, I understand the practical necessity - one side lies because the other side lies too, both stuck in a feedback loop. But I'd still say both are behaving unethically. Two wrongs don't make a right.

I subscribe to the viewpoint I've best seen phrased in an old blog post[0]: "promoting less than maximally accurate beliefs is an act of sabotage. Don’t do it to anyone unless you’d also slash their tires".

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[0] - http://web.archive.org/web/20080915221100/http://www.acceler...

Basically a full training set with all the words does not exist. Even less a set with actual translations for them.

This also means that autocomplete etc is pretty much useless for us. I just disable it on iPhone as it actively makes typing out a sentence harder.

(also to make things harder as others have pointed out the base word and inflections get changed to make the word easier to pronounce so there is no static form for them when you stack them)

But in what language would those texts be? Language models used for translation are trained on sentence pairs. How would e.g. a book on the grammar of Finnish, written in Finnish and without a translation in English, help learn how to translate Finnish into English?

I'm genuinely asking. This sounds like an interesting idea- but how exactly would it work?

Problem is of course how to learn the meanings, when they are omitted in translations. Even native speaker is not always sure, like is "koiran-ko-han-ko" a tautology, or does the second question-mark refer to to the "han". "You wanted a dog, yes?" vs. "You wanted a dog, yes? You sure now?".

I'm almost sure autocompletion in Finnish (or Estonian or Hungarian) is borderline useless, as the chances to write a word that wasn't ever written before are quite high.

But even with more "sane" grammars these models barely work. When I write in Spanish, often there are verb forms that are missing that I have to type fully.

For example, in Spanish, all forms are on conjugation lists, but it can be tough to find a set of corpuses that covers all. I know that a 2016 Spanish Wikipedia dump I played with covered about 20% of all verb forms present in rae.es.

Then on all those forms (I'd say about 16-18 tense/mood/aspect forms are in common use) you have to take into account enclitic/affix pronouns, and the whole thing goes awry quick.

"Comámosnoslas" - If you search on Google, there are only 9 results[0], this post likely to become the 10th. But it's a completely normal word a Spanish speaker may use and will understand.

comamos ("let us eat") nos (emphasis "for ourselves") las ("them", feminine). "Let's eat them!" but with emphasis lost in translation.

E.g. usage "Hay 3 pizzas, ¡comámosnoslas!" . This sentence, funnily, is properly translated by Google Translate into English, but it tries to correct it to "comamosnos las" which is absolutely broken Spanish.

[0]https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=comamosnoslas

They are both neighbouring contries of the UK, with similar idioom. Finnish is another league. Congrats BTW, many English native speakers these days try but, in my experience, use English in business settings only.

What do you mean with "a reason why"? From a synchronic or a diachronic point of view? Yes, there are reasons that linguists can provide. But for the mere layman, it will simply be weird to encounter such an utterance, full stop. Not that your question is non-sense, I would rather simply expect most people to be unable to tell you why despite they know it sounds weird.

> I know it's just a word-for-word translation, but the latter seems more natural, and the former unnecessarily verbose.

What you mean with "seems more natural", is that it sounds closer to what you are accustomed to in your own language. French is generally more verbose than English, especially in usual written form.

Now, as your "why" is nontheless completely legitimate, here is one explanation .In the case of "sa bibliothèque et la sienne", unlike in English which insist on the possessor (his/her takes the gender of the one who owns the object), French insists on the possessed (sien/sienne takes the gender of the object which is possessed, and every substantive have a gender). So would you translate "her library and his" in the same way, you would end up with the very same translation "sa bibliothèque et la sienne". On the other hand "sa bibliothèque à elle et sa bibliothèque à lui" would preserve the information of who owns each library.

Would you really mind to comes that is as close as possible to the original prosody, you might use "sa bibliothèque à lui, et elle la sienne."