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Comment by bumby | Hacker News Reader

"insert a Russian book at one end and come out with an English book at the other," Doctor Dostert predicted that "five, perhaps three years hence, interlingual meaning conversion by electronic process in important functional areas of several languages may well be an accomplished fact."[1]

-IBM Press Release 1954 regarding the 701 translator

Predicting the problem will be solved in a few short years is the easy part. Execution to realize those predictions is much harder.

[1] https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/701/701_translator....

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It would be easy to translate any book into any other book (if every language was a one-to-one variant of each other with no differences in slang or metaphor or cultural backdrop that converts simple turns of phrases into a medley of aphorisms each deserving of their own short stories.)

Other than that all you need is a camera, a computer and a dictionary.

If that were true, we should expect to be able to feed that initial quote through multiple translations with minimal meaning loss. Here is the result of translating that entire phrase from English -> Greek -> Serbian -> Creole -> English with a popular translating tool:

"put a Russian book at one end and an English book at the other, ”predicted Dr. Dostert."

It completely loses its original meaning not to mention the latter half of the quote.

I think the constraint of "if every language was a one-to-one variant" is too constricting to be of use in the real world. The reason why this is hard is because that rule rarely holds true. Language is more about communicating concepts than just words. Translating one-to-one concepts is much harder because you need to understand context.

Ok, I didn't think I was subtle but I was exceedingly sarcastic in my reply. I don't think any language is 1 to 1 with any other language, and expecting to be able to directly translate with a simple dictionary is patently absurd.

Complications don't start at phrases.

Being intimately familiar with a couple languages, I find it a bit frustrating how often single words can't be translated perfectly because of small differences in meaning. Google Translate also often gets confused with false friends.

Yes and crossing language families often results in words your native language thinks of as atomic being divided into multiple more specific concepts (or vice versa). For example Japanese has no word for foot- they just say leg and use context to infer what part is meant. On the other hand they have 3 words for specific parts of the back/hip area we would usually just call back or lower back in English. This kind of thing causes no end of confusion.

Er. Doesn't that quote support their argument, rather than counter it?

At this point, language isn't a barrier. I read and write Russian without knowing how to read or write Russian. I regularly talk to my Russian friends in Russian thanks to Google Translate.

It may have taken a bit longer than the 1954 prediction said, but it did happen.

Do you buy books translated with Google?

67 years have passed and we still need translation for many applications.

That’s not an indictment of the technology; only of the extreme optimism.

That's an economics issue, not a technology one. Books are mass market items where it makes sense to translate it once and sell the translation thousands of times. Putting a whole book into a translation software would generally be more laborious than tracking down an edition in the language of choice.

But in 1954 there were no web pages and reading articles or papers published in foreign languages was extremely rare. Nowadays, these are all translated instantaneously for free by modern web browsers with reasonable fidelity. And odds are these make up the overwhelming majority of the foreign language material a modern person consumes.

Google Translate often fails spectacularly, DeepL is a lot better but it fails too.

I imagine the pairs of languages plays a part, and of course the prose.

Regardless; there will always be ambiguities, and many sometimes-important-subtleties are bound to be lost in translation. Even when a professional human does it.

(Also your prediction being half a dozen decades late isn't particularly useful.)

It would be helpful if your downvoters would explain their reasoning.

To corroborate your point about Google translate, that’s exactly what writers used to create gobbledygook language for the malfunctioning robot in The Good Place. They literally used the tool to translate his dialogue from one language to the next so it would be semi-incomprehensible gibberish

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