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Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

These translation issues will be familiar to anybody learning a current, very much alive language, especially if you're reading informal forums (say, Youtube comments). You have the same types of abbreviations, more-or-less voluntary misspellings and jokes or references that only make sense from a certain cultural standpoint.

I'm sure most foreign language students will sympathize with the very frustrating and demoralizing situation where you read a sentence, understand every single word but you still have absolutely no idea what it's trying to convey because you're missing some idiom, reference or alternative meaning of one of the words.

For the English monolinguals reading this, imagine studying English and stumbling upon the sentence "I fell for her", except that you only know the literal meaning of the verb "to fall" so while you understand the words in isolation the sentence remains completely opaque and meaningless to you.

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Almost all foreign language studies I know of include a collection of stories / literature where a number of common sayings are from.

Ex: English studies would not be complete without Aesop Fables. Learning the stories is the only way you can understand common phrases / idioms like "sour grapes".

Chinese studies includes Romance of the Three Kingdoms. A Chinese Friend of mine explained the meaning of the phrase "Pour the oil", based on some Sima-Yi / Zhuge Liang story from RotTK. (Which IIRC, means something along the lines of "I'm not going to be a sore loser about this")

Japanese studies include something about an impenetrable shield and the all-penetrating spear, which apparently is the root word for contradict. Using "Google Translate" on this one, "矛盾" translates into "Contradict". But "矛" means Spear, and "盾" means shield.

So a dumb translation would translate "矛盾" into "SpearShield", which is nonsense. But the meaning is "To Contradict".

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra

Was just going to say, reminds me of the classic Trek HFY sequence: https://imgur.com/gallery/qSmHy

"what is the work 'fuck' for", the innocent young vulcans want to know. "surely there are more logical intensity modifiers."

"yeah, you'd think so," say the weary, jaded vulcan professors, "you'd really fucking think so."

It's not quite the same (less action for one), but if the "humans have crazy ideas" aspect is interesting, then the Starfleet Corps of Engineers (aka Star Trek: SCE) novels might be worth a look. Haven't read many of them myself, but "make things work any way you can" is basically how they function.

This quote sums up my Italian experience. The language is so full of phrases which - like everything - are regional, that Google Translate often just gives up.

My favourite is "in bocca al lupo", which roughly translates to "break a leg" - note the lack of verb.

Also that's the current meaning, which changed over the last century.

On top of that I remember three commonly used gestures two of which look the same to the uninitiated eye on photos.

Overall: his eyes red!

That's either a dog's breakfast or the cat's pajamas, but I'm not sure which, or which story holds the explanation.

A lot of slang was invented less than 1000 years ago.

Ex: English studies would not be complete without Aesop Fables. Learning the stories is the only way you can understand common phrases / idioms like "sour grapes".

Most of the vocabulary you pick up from context; idioms aren't fundamentally different from other parts of the language in that regard. You don't need to know an idiom's source material to understand its meaning, no more than you need to be aware of a word's etymology to use it. Though it doesn't hurt and it's often fascinating.

From a practical perspective, I believe the whole point is that an idiom is fundamentally different. If you are a non-native speaker, you can look up a word you don't know. But if it's an idiomatic phrase, like "waiting for the other shoe to drop," looking up each word in the phrase does you no good. Studying fables etc. is a great way to learn them.

I'm a native English speaker and I actually have no idea where "waiting for the other shoe to drop" comes from, but I know its idiomatic meaning.

Same here, and another one that irritates me is "being left high and dry", which is a bad thing. But I envision high and dry as a good thing, isn't that where you would want to be in a storm or at sea?

Truth be told I never actually looked up where a lot of these idioms come from. I just heard other people using them and then I started to use them too.

But not if you tied your boat up in a harbour, and then when the tide went out, you can't sail it because it is high and dry sitting on it's hull instead of floating.

You can look up the entire phrase or just ask someone. There’s no need to know where it came from, although it might make retention easier, or comprehension better. Nothing beats time spent immersed in the language and just asking questions or looking at context when something seems odd. Living languages aren’t static targets either, you’ll sound formal or just plain strange if you elevate dictionary definitions over experience and practice with common usage.

These days, you can easily look them up. To viz: https://dict.leo.org/german-english/waiting%20for%20the%20ot...

Interestingly, the first given translation is itself an idiom (lit. "to wait for the thick/fat end"). An idiom I understand, even though I had no idea where it's from; I looked it up, it relates to corporal punishment. The second translation is a more generic one.

The second translation is a biblical reference, where a "Hiobsbotschaft" implies receiving news of a further tragedy, invoking the Old Testament character Job (Hiob), whose faith was tested by suffering great losses.

Unfortunately neither of these help to understand the English shoe idiom which I, as a native English speaker, have no clue about.

In some cases, there's an equivalent idiom in the native language, and while the scenario may be very different, the underlying similarity is readily apparent.

These idioms are basically compound words, the meaning is barely related to the component words.

A good example of this, in English, is the meaning of the phrase "O.K.", which is "oll komplete", a funny 1700s-era meme when newspapers (at the time) would misspell words on purpose.

Most of those misspellings have been forgotten, but the most common: Oll Komplete (All Complete) was so common, it became ingrained in our language. Today, everyone knows things are Okay, despite not remembering the original story.

-------

Still, learning some degree of stories helps remind us that not all words are to be taken literally in a language. That meanings are assigned based off of shared experiencnes.

> which is "oll komplete"

There is no definitive answer for the etymology of OK - your declaration certainly isn’t a fact. And it wasn’t in the 1700’s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_proposed_etymologies_o...

Yeah this is apocryphal at best.

um, at least this is more important in Japanese and Chinese. in another way, usually people should rely on this to memorize it.

矛盾 is Chinese.

矛盾 is used the same in Japanese - 'onyomi' words use Chinese readings of hanzi, as opposed to 'kunyomi', which uses the Japanese reading.

Though, as someone who speaks a little 日本語 (though nowhere near fluent), I don't quite understand the significance being ascribed here. There are huge numbers of Jukugo ("compound kanji") [which are frequently, but not exclusively, onyomi words] where trying to understand the word as a compound of the kanji/hanzi components would be equally nonsensical, and aren't anything that requires special mention in language learning. Having multiple readings of even a single kanji is also pretty normal, and sometimes those are not all readily apparent from understanding one definition, either. Also plenty of kunyomi words where the reading would end up with a word totally different from the initial kanji/hanzi.

To my knowledge, this is no more due to idioms from culturally significant literature than the word 'novel' being used to describe books and new ideas is.

Edit: Looks like a fable is the origin for the word in Chinese, but no mention of the fable when I learned it in Japanese, or indication that it was any different than any other word where the component hanzi/kanji (or radicals therein) would not make sense as the definition.

> but no mention of the fable when I learned it in Japanese

I personally learned of it from the Japanese game "Ace Attorney".

There's a spear/shield ornament somewhere as evidence, so the game spends a decent amount of time introducing the myth to the audience. The myth is seen again in Trigun (impenetrable shield was one of the enemies that Vash took down), and again in "Rising of the Shield Hero" where Shield-guy's biggest rival is the Spear-guy.

A lot of Japanese media talk about this spear-vs-shield story. If it was a myth borrowed from China, that still makes sense. (Aesop is Greek after all, but still influenced English).

--------

My overall point is that some words reference stories rather than the actual meaning of the word. Learning the underlying stories can help when learning those languages.

To me, it's interesting in the "Huh, neat" kind of way in the same way knowing the etymology of "sour grapes" is. At least personally, I don't find it particularly useful for actually learning the language - there's just too many words like this for it to provide me any real advantage, and I'd likely end up confusing myself more when running into the words where there isn't any similar significance. For example, irresponsible/sloppy is 'いい加減', and 加 means increase while 減 means decrease - I could see myself going 'hmm I know the word contradiction is one where the two kanji actually contradict each other... increase and decrease contradict each other, I bet this is it!"

The term comes from the ancient text Han Feizi from 3rd century AD China.

It was absorbed into Sino-Japanese vocabulary along with many other Chinese words.

kkndve English speaker checking in, I did not know that the phrase "sour grapes" comes from Aesop.

Honestly I only vaguely recall reading a few stories from Aesop when I was in second grade or something. Maybe a story about a wolf and another animal and a river? None of it really stuck.

I can easily imagine a hypothetical version of English that does not borrow words from Latin and in which 'spearshield' would be a verb.

> I'm sure most foreign language students will sympathize with the very frustrating and demoralizing situation where you read a sentence, understand every single word but you still have absolutely no idea what it's trying to convey because you're missing some idiom, reference or alternative meaning of one of the words.

It's actually pretty rare, at least for me when I was learning English. Usually I would understand from the context what the idiom must mean, but not necessarily what each word means.

For example: "don't count your chickens before they're hatched" was pretty obvious, but "hatched" was a new word for me in this meaning, I only knew about the door thingy not "hatching from eggs".

I think there's 2 styles of learning - breadth-first and depth-first. My wife is a depth-first learner. She would look up every definition as many levels down as needed before going to the next part. It drove me crazy when I studied with her because my stack would overflow.

I try to understand the general idea, look how it works, and only then go down into details. She was very frustrated with this because she couldn't deal with "details we ignore for now".

In language learning I think depth-first is a bad idea, because meaning of the details change with context. So when I learn a language I don't even look up unfamiliar words if I can still guess the general meaning. After encountering a word many times in different contexts you get intuition on what it means and how it's used much better than if you looked it up and took the first meaning as gospel.

> For example: "don't count your chickens before they're hatched" was pretty obvious, but "hatched" was a new word for me in this meaning, I only knew about the door thingy not "hatching from eggs".

Nearly monolingual English speaker here.

I'm very familiar with the noun "hatch" meaning a kind of door, and the verb "hatch" meaning to emerge from an egg. But until just now I had never noticed that they're spelled and pronounced the same way. (And apparently they're etymologically unrelated.)

Also native English speaker.

One thing I learned recently is the etymologies of the words for “Orange”.

The Orange Order is a fraternal order in Northern Ireland named in honour of the (Dutch) William of Orange, whose title is from the Principality of Orange (in what is now southern France), named after the city of Orange, whose name reached that after a few rounds of minor corruption from the Gaulish “Arausio” meaning cheek or temple.

The Orange Order likes the colour orange. I don’t know where on that etymological chain the connection stops, but the word for the colour is derived from the fruit, the fruit has the name “an orange” as a corruption of “a norange” (except the language this happened in varies from English, French, Spanish and Italian depending who I ask, so might have been “une norenge” but all the stories agree the “n” shifted), that from the Arabic nāranj, and that is apparently fairly close to the Dravidian root word.

Returning to William of Orange, the Dutch word for the fruit is “Sinaasappel” - Chinese Apple. And of course, “Mandarin” is the English words for both a type of orange and a branch of the Chinese language.

Interesting… in Bangalore fruit vendors call loose-skinned oranges “Nar Oranges” and apparently the first plantation of these was in Narpur, introduced from China. In South Africa these same kinds of oranges are called nartjies.

It tickles my funny bone to no end that William of Orange is known to the Spaniards as Guillermo de Naranja.

It shouldn't, somehow, Guillermo is William and Naranja is orang, it just sounds like someone is having me on.

I found that most amusing too when I lived in Madrid.

Not sure why!

It’s not, it’s Guillermo de Orange. Source: check spanish wikipedia and the ratio of google results for each term.

Sorry!

English, the magical language where you have

hatch / to hatch

fire / to fire

function / to function

form / to form

moor / to moor

...

I remember that reading bash.org 15 or so years ago was pretty hard for me, because many puns and slang was confusing or ambiguous for me. I wish I remembered specific examples.

Well actually I do have one from that time, but not from bash.org: when I started playing nethack I remember being confused because the game would describe foul foodstuffs as "tasting terrible", but in colloquial French (my native language) "terrible" is often used as a positive adjective (much like "awesome" shifted from meaning "inspiring terror" to "excellent" in the English vernacular).

So, when the game says that something "tastes terrible", does it mean that it tastes awful or awesome? I now know the answer, but back then it wasn't so obvious.

This reminds me of one of my favourite quotes from Pterry and the Discworld:

Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.

Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.

Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.

Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.

Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.

Elves are terrific. They beget terror.

The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.

GNU Terry Pratchett.

Perhaps a better example would be "he was born on third base and thought he hit a home run," vs. "he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth." The latter is easy to figure out but unless you know about baseball it's hard to figure out the first.

Idioms can be hard when they are presented in abstract like that. But if somebody said "Trump calls himself a genius businessman. He was born on third base and thought he hit a home run." I would know what it means no problem.

That's what I meant by guessing from context.

It sounds like this idiom has been comically overextended for effect, though.

Sometimes this is funny, sometimes it's aggravating.

In this case, funny and extremely apt.

   The latter is easy to figure out

That misquote would confuse even somebody who knows baseball. The actual quote is, "There are many people who don`t know what real pressure is. Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple."

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1986-12-14-860403...

True, though "thinking they hit a home run" is a nice extension of the same concept: not only do they think that they deserve what they got for no effort, but are actually angry that they didn't get more.

(Coincidentally, I used exactly that expression, precisely that way, earlier today. Unless somehow the OP read what I wrote, which isn't impossible.)

Haha of course.

> So when I learn a language I don't even look up unfamiliar words if I can still guess the general meaning.

This is the kind of thinking that led to a friend of mine and his entire family, touring Germany, saying the word for "apple juice" whenever they meant to say "thank you".

I'm not even kidding.

Comic example in film: in the Oliver Reed film Hannibal Brooks, a misunderstanding leads one of the major characters to believe that elephant translates into english as "we're-here".

There are several misunderstandings in translation between Australian Aboriginal languages and English.

This Finnish comedian trying to makes sense of the word "shit" illustrates this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXH3HDE9Czo

That was a fun set! Thank you for posting that.

Sounds like a foreigner's take on George Carlin's old skit

Youtube is also recommending me another of his videos on the word "ass": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P0Z1yq-2FQ

Most of the replies here kind of miss the point and talk about idioms (hatching eggs, dropping shoes, etc.). Idioms are indeed hard, but every languages has their own. So, when you meet eggs, shoes or whatever in a discussion that was not about chickens or fashion, you can at least suspect it's figurative.

Meanwhile, "To fall for someone" is not an idiom but a phrasal verb, and these are (imho) much harder than idioms because they do not "signal" their exceptionality as strongly. How am I supposed to know that "falling for someone" does not involve any actual falling, or that when you "make up with someone" you are not really making anything?

Prepositions are the bane of getting true fluency in English. Making up and making out are both options, but very different ones.

"First you cut the tree down, then you cut the tree up."

> For the English monolinguals reading this, imagine studying English and stumbling upon the sentence "I fell for her", except that you only know the literal meaning of the verb "to fall" so while you understand the words in isolation the sentence remains completely opaque and meaningless to you.

This isn't a great example; from a dictionary perspective there are three words in the sentence "I fell for her", being "I", "fell for", and "her". Trying to analyze it as the four words "I", "fell", "for", and "her" is doomed to failure[1], because two of those words aren't even present. But if you did know all the words in isolation, you'd have no trouble with the sentence; nothing tricky is going on.

(The four-word analysis actually does work, but it would be an unusual reading, with "for her" being a benefactive construction analogous to "I wrote a song for her".)

[1] You can get a sense of why this analysis can't succeed by trying to relate "her" as used in the sentence to any standard sense of the preposition "for". ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/for#Preposition ). None of them work.

Sokath, his eyes open!

> [...] you still have absolutely no idea what it's trying to convey because you're missing some idiom, reference or alternative meaning of one of the words.

This is further exacerbated today where the contexts could be cross-cultural, due to the Internet fostering quicker and communication over borders. I recently ran across a (somewhat off-color) humorous username 「一哭二鬧三上悠亞」: it would have made no sense at all if you only know the Chinese context (first six characters) or the Japanese context (last four characters)! Even though all eight characters are intelligible independently in both Chinese and Japanese.

That YouTube person who learns languages and surprises native speakers discovered this when he had Chinese teachers rate him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kxfTGbSfqA

It turns out there are a lot of poems, stories, etc a native speaker would learn in school and apply to their speech that a foreign learner might not even know about. One of the teachers compared this to learning Shakespeare, but I don't think it's nearly as involved in day-to-day speech the way it seems to be for native speakers of Chinese languages. I certainly don't know anything about Shakespeare other than what I picked up from Star Trek even though I'm sure I use things that came from his works all the time without knowing.

I used to work with a lot of Swedes. I learned literal English translations of several Swedish idioms. I don't think any relied on wordplay, so they worked fine as standalone idioms, with some having similar versions in English (holding thumbs vs. crossing fingers).

I always had this problem with Mexican food.

  - Burrito... ew
  - Alambre. huh?
  - "al Pastor" ok, that must be lamb... it's PORK??? WTF???

And then I order "papas con cuero" thinking this must be yet another poetic name for food, and find that it's exactly what it says on the tin[1]. /facepalm

[1] "What it says on the tin" is a reference to canned food, where the label on the can is important, because you can't see inside. Of course, the cans are made out of steel these days, but we still... ugh, never mind.

Or imagine being autistic and taking things way too literally.

One of my biggest epiphanies was realizing how much dumb hit music was actually partially catering to English as a second language speakers for broader appeal.

sort of like the opposite of hip-hop/rap (think of all the new words meaning "the police" for example)

its just evolved, it's prevalent in hip-hop and rap too, at least what gets on top of the billboards

This is one of the arguments against machine translation: one would first need to construct an AGI capable of observing and understanding the living cultural context that language is being used in. Without that, researchers are endlessly having to update the training corpus for the ML system to learn by example.

The day a machine can make a meme is the day we reach the singularity.

Welcome, to the World of Tomorrow!

https://imgflip.com/ai-meme

It sort of works... https://imgflip.com/i/69gjkt

"If a lion could speak, we could not understand (verstehen)[0] him."

- Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Philosophical Investigations

[0] Ironically, there is disagreement over the best translation of verstehen. Understand and comprehend have some conceptual overlap, but also some distinctions. The general idea is, though, of understanding in a greater, more all encompassing sense that is only possible when someone/something is no longer alien.

How would one even attempt to communicate with an octopus?

Alien intelligence: the extraordinary minds of octopuses and other cephalopods

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/28/alien-in...

It's OK, Contact prepared me for this. We should use math. Have we tried strobing a 2-3-5-7 sequence at one, and see if it gives us 11?

(The above is meant in jest, of course.)

> (The above is meant in jest, of course.)

Sounds like a good idea to me. But of course one needs to be open minded, there are other functions that satisfy the same rules. :-)

More seriously, I think humans and other mammals generally can learn to share an “animal” language which uses repetition for bidirectional training (animal to human, human to animal).

Elements used for prediction include: - Predictable timing, both circadian and in relation to circumstantial events - body language - sound patterns - touch patterns - performative actions with environmental objects

It’s not so much a “universal” language, but rather that mammals seem to share some semi-universal ability to train each other in these cues and learn them. They can be used for surprisingly rich inter-species communication and over time both parties move a lot of the inference and signaling to their subconscious, no longer even taking active brain power to decipher intent and meanings.

I’ve also done this when I was working very closely with just myself and one other person and neither of us spoke the others language but we had to get the job done for 8-12 hours every day. We established a system of different grunts and cues that we used first for several weeks. Once that was fluid and we could communicate everything that we needed to, we started replacing/connecting the established grunts with our own language words and that’s how we taught eachother the others’ language. At least for the domain of our work.

I have no idea if any of these would be possible with cephalopods but I feel like if we had children and baby octopuses raised together they may find reasonably robust ways to communicate intent, feelings, and find the ability to create novel games to play with eachother.

It’s hard to say as the further you get away from a common ancestor the more the behavior of different species diverges (maybe a bit tautological, but still worth pointing out).

I played with my pet rat and we were good friends. We’d play little games and I’d tickle her Rats and humans diverged maybe 80 million years ago. Interestingly, humans and dogs diverged perhaps 100 million years ago, and we know we can communicate with dogs.

However an octopus is ~600 million years away from a mutual common ancestor, which is way back in the Precambrian. It’s an order of magnitude more time.

Humans created dogs out of the wolves best able to communicate with humans.

It's been a consistent artificial selection pressure.

Dogs even developed facial muscles to communicate with human expressions.

Dogs created civilization out of humans by consistently helping the most cooperative ones. Even today, dog “owners” live longer and attract more mates. It’s consistent selection pressure.

>learn to share an “animal” language

Aren't there a few primates that have learned sign language?

Shame cephalopods only live a couple of years, while humans typically require 30 years to achieve a basic level of intelligence

We could just agree that "to forestand" is a new word that means the same as German "verstehen", and maybe eventually it actually would.

I do not believe this would make sense. The German 'ver-' has nothing in common with the English 'fore-'.

"We would [understand the Lion]. We're flexible and can get into different perspectives, and we have been close to animal living ourselves for hundreds of thousands of years, plus we watch nature and learn about how lions live and what they do. The lion would have difficulty understanding us, as our world is a superset of its world" - coldtea

Yeah, I think we'd be just fine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim_Chimpsky

> Nim's longest "sentence" was the 16-word-long "Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you."

One could argue that this isn't talking to a well adjusted animal living in its native habitat. It is talking to a long term research subject/victim suffering at the hands of "researchers" while trying to teach it a language that is utterly alien to it. Of course knowing how animals communicate in their natural habitat is not useful if you want to ask them deep questions like "what do you think about global warming" or "do you think god exists", to which they probably wouldn't have an answer anyway.

> The general idea is, though, of understanding in a greater, more all encompassing sense that is only possible when someone/something is no longer alien.

I would put forward "grok" as a translation. Your use of "no longer alien" evokes that word all the more.

Funny how a fictional word, ostensibly Martian, can come to have colloquial meaning in English, even to those who haven’t read the book.

Shakespeare and Aesop… and Heinlein.

I believe machine translation will coevolve with human languages. The utility of machine translation is clear even when the translation is a bit off, so people will be forced to use machine translation anyway and subsequently tweak their own language to have a better chance for machine translators to pick up its meaning. This is actually also a valid strategy to use MT today.

I say this both as someone with a degree in linguistics and who has worked as a programmer for decades, there is no way that will happen. People are never going to stop using cultural references, shortened forms, double meanings, puns, abbreviations, slang, etc. just to make machine translation work better.

Of course this is all speculative and I never said intricacies of human languages will disappear, but human is extremely adaptive. Historically there already had been cases where different languages are used for different social contexts, so we can imagine a similar dichitomy between an informal language (not very amenable to MT) and a formal language (amenable to MT).

I attempt this when communicating with Chinese parts of my business where English may not be spoken at all. I also don’t know any Chinese.

I will generally run my English emails through machine translation back and forth multiple times until I find phrasing and word choices which are “bistable” (I get back the original English). I’ll also usually double check specific critical or unstable words using a variety of translation aids (not machine translation) to ensure any (scope-limited) Chinese I write is actually correct.

We do have one native Chinese on my side of the team, and every time I’ve had her check the Chinese she says it’s correct for our technical domain.

So we really are already at the point where we can communicate across languages with surprisingly low error rates.

Isn't Chinese actually a best case scenario for machine translation, with huge amounts of text available, and little if any variance (no tenses, no persons, no plural, no declinations)?

Maybe not stop completely, but certainly in some contexts, e.g. when using machine translation to produce text in a language you can passively understand but don't have a large active vocabulary in.

Which I did just yesterday by putting the text I wanted to convey into Google Translate and then tweaking it until the translation looked reasonable. In the end, I still had to postprocess the output a bit, but I ended up with something which I couldn't have written if starting from scratch, which was entirely worth the small pain of using slightly less colorful language.

SEO'd websites use "Google English".

> I say this both as someone with a degree in linguistics and who has worked as a programmer for decades, there is no way that will happen. People are never going to stop using cultural references, shortened forms, double meanings, puns, abbreviations, slang, etc. just to make machine translation work better.

In general you are correct, but there is the special case of a person using machine translation as a tool to try and communicate with someone they don't share a language with.

Of course, the first approximation is the person performing all the stereotypical monolingual behaviors of speaking extra slowly and loudly, using pseudo-simplified language, accompanied with exaggerated hand gestures that don't really help.

BTW, I've seen people struggling with voice assistants in almost exactly the same way (absent the hand gestures).

But the point is that people modify their language to try and compensate for communication barriers all the time, and it is just a skill, whether it is speaking to children, or foreigners, or code switching to speak to someone in a different class or subculture. Machine translation adds a new wrinkle to the mix, but it isn't all that different.

The (very old) machine translation joke: The computer was asked to translate the phrase: "The spirit is strong but the flesh is weak" into Russian. The output was: "The vodka is great but the meat is rotten".

GPT-3 handles idioms just fine. Here I tested it on "I fell for her." https://files.catbox.moe/lp6oyg.jpeg

You're missing the point of the parent comment: GPT-3 can understand this idiom because it was trained on a corpus in which the context for this idiom already existed. If a new idiom would emerge, the system would not necessarily be able to handle it if it can not understand it from the context it was trained on. Therefore, a translating AI needs to be continuously updated.

Is that any different than a human? They can be pwnded by new idioms.

No it isn't of course, but that speaks for the argument that AGI is necessary for human-level translation :)

Or just an up-to-date GPT?

Like, for example, “to be pwned”, which I believe is not going to be understood by majority of English speakers.

And even fewer ML proggies.

Ackshually... :)

https://files.catbox.moe/yvhqwd.jpeg

I think Humans are pretty good at at least recognizing that a particular phrasing doesn't make sense as a literal statement and so must be a reference to something. Often you can get an idea of what it's meant to mean just by context. Sometimes if you see a dozen or so usages, you get the idea of what it means without ever having it explicitly explained.

One of the main differences between humans and ML is that humans learn in far fewer examples than machines.

"Poverty of the stimulus"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_of_the_stimulus

Until the models become more sophisticated than human brains. Then humans will need more examples than a machine would to learn the same thing.

Good luck accurately machine translating the infinitely growing idiom of jokey Twitter conversation, which most native speakers can pick up pretty quickly.

"The speaker became attracted to the person they are talking about" is definitely not the way I (native US English speaker) would explain falling for someone, and any person or robot using it that way is likely to sow confusion.

How does it do with "I fell for it?"

"Falling for someone" can mean both "falling in love with someone" and "to be trapped/tricked by someone" according to both my experience and my go-to dictionary [1] [2]. "Falling for something" is clearly in the realm of "being tricked" according to [3] (but that source also puts "falling for somebody" squarely on the "love" side of things [4]).

So I would say that, while you may have never heard it used that way, it certainly has that meaning in practice to many people. Don't judge the robot so harshly.

[1]: https://dict.leo.org/pages/addinfo/addInfo.php?aiid=En842ho0...

[2]: https://dict.leo.org/pages/addinfo/addInfo.php?aiid=EKHR2Car...

[3]: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fall-for...

[4]: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fall-for...

Passed the test: https://files.catbox.moe/f1b7ar.jpeg

It's not really a great argument. Languages are always evolving, so there's always a need to update the system by ingesting new inputs. Even natural general intelligences, aka us humans, learn by repeatedly ingesting the new inputs and perhaps supplementary data, like an explanation from a friend or maybe urbandictionary.

EDIT: As an example, how much time is dedicated in schools to explaining turns of phrase and such in Shakespeare. Who at least was writing Modern English. Go back to Chaucer and good luck...

Machine translation can take the context statistically really well.

Idioms are a part of a regular curriculum as much as just plain meanings of works.

Another example would by Troy, which was a mythological city until it’s location was discovered.

now imagine reading something from genz slang language: Big Yikes fam, Glow up! Periodt

I've read that English is one of the most idiomatic languages. I believe it.

Imagine stumbling upon a "Yes." meme

I'm 30+ and I can't understand teenagers texting on my own mother language.

Bruh

I don't know if this is a reference to the recent South Park episode, but do teenagers really say "bruh" so much? I thought that was something people said a decade ago, although they used to ironically spell it "bra" sometimes.

I can confirm that "bruh" is very popular with at least the teens I interact with through online games, yes.

The spelling change seems to be indicative of the generation shift (and a slightly different pronunciation). From what (little) exposure I've had to teenagers in recent years "bruh" is "correct" (and "bra" is "ancient" and "bro" is "boring"). Slang usage shifts in weird ways.

I'm pretty sure it's brah, coming from Hawaiian pidgin. It's a shortening of braddah (i.e. brother).

I'm sure both still exist. Slang always is prone to regionalisms and in-group markings. What I've heard (on Xbox voice chat primarily) as commonly used today is "bruh" like much closer to how most people pronounce "duh". I don't know where it originates dialectally other than "often heard in Fortnite and Minecraft".

(Definitely the one closer to my youth came closer to "bra"/"brah", and while some of that was assumed to be surfer-originated, I can't tell you how much it was related to Hawaiian pigdin or just convergent evolutionary vowel shifts.)

yeah, 'bruh' has been a thing for the past... 7-8 years now? hit its peak around 2016 but is still going strong.

no cap frfr

No cap, there was a translation of Beowulf a few years ago that deadass translated the first word of the saga, "Hwæt", as "Bro!" (like how a drunk storyteller sitting next to you at the bar might say "Bro, listen to this shit" instead of the more staid/traditional openers like "Harken!")

Fr fr no cap that shit bussin dawg, gotta relate to the chilluns mang

>I'm sure most foreign language students will sympathize with the very frustrating and demoralizing situation where you read a sentence, understand every single word but you still have absolutely no idea what it's trying to convey because you're missing some idiom, reference or alternative meaning of one of the words.

I know someone who won't sympathize with this difficulty, as he insisted on an obscure abortion joke in the man page for abort(), which will come off as super confusing to anyone who doesn't know the reference.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17015644

RMS has been known to make the odd comment (once or twice) where raising awareness of an important idea takes priority over immediate convenience. That doesn't mean he unsympathetic to challenges of foreign languages.

If the documentation is intended to be used as a technical reference by people who won’t get the reference, that is, by its nature, unsympathetic to the people who will be using it, no matter what he claims — and I don’t think he has ever actually shown how he’s weighed such concerns.

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