Thinking in a foreign language improves decision-making
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The letter ordering is wrong (ltr instead of rtl). The word ordering is wrong (ltr instead of rtl). Somehow they also managed to get the letters not to connect to each other.
Great job Guardian! 10/10
The people who make these products have to spend millions and millions of dollars setting up factories, hiring people, putting things into production, etc. But somehow they don't have a budget for a bilingual college student intern to translate a bunch of copy to English better than "using this product will bring a great joy." Why? I would be super interested in some journalist figuring out why this happens.
Of course, there's always the viewpoint of "why would they need to translate better? It's just money that they don't need to spend, and this works for their business." So I will make a super strong claim: ChatGPT can now do nearly perfect mass translations of this stuff for free, in theory simultaneously increasing translation quality and reducing costs. Despite this, for whatever reason, I predict that the average translation quality on Amazon won't improve within the next few years.
Anyone want to take the other side of that bet?
Hell, when I was a game dev, in a studio of less than 50 people we had a sudden and huge demand to port our game to China. It was a Czech studio making a game in English that was being translated to Mandarin. It cost us one single person, his entire job was translating text files we sent him and managing our China social media presence.
It absolutely boggles the mind that these Chinese companies can't or won't hire a single English-speaking copyeditor
I'm going to use this example for years.
Let’s pretend for a moment that writing marketing copy is something everyone can just magically do. Your problem is now you have to explain to your superiors that direct word for word translation doesn’t work, that some phrases don’t exist in English, or that made up Engrish words can’t just be slot into English sentences [0]
[0]: Enjoy the girl! https://www.campaignjapan.com/article/%E5%A4%89%E3%81%AA%E8%...
I see. That's gotta be hard in a setting where a superior is always right and knows it all by default, even if they don't. I can imagine all the hard work you'd have to go through to manipulate the superior to think it was them who knew about the problem and came up with a solution. Definitely not worth it for just about anyone, let alone an intern.
I've actually considered whether this is a business opportunity, but concluded that there's really no way a business can demonstrate value over whoever is currently doing the crappy translation.
Actually, forget cheap Asian consumer products.
I've seen actual academics (eg. Sinologists from the "West") totally misunderstand classical Chinese texts (I forgot the details, sorry). On a related note, a lot of the English "Confucious quotes" floating on the Internet are quite funny, and it's often a fun exercise to determine where the quote came from, or whether it was completely made up. I mean, just imagine you're making a product and wanted to localize it for the China market, you might even be tempted to demonstrate your knowledge of the target demographics by asking the team to add a Confucius quote you saw (which is fake). Now at this point you better hope you got a really good translator who actually knows the Analects by heart and could find a suitable quote to substitute.
"daughter, i have fed you and paid for your education all these years, translate this!"
"yes, dad"
my point being, might not be budget constraints so much as, look, dad's arms are too short to reach the change in his pockets
It shows a lack of care, empathy, and diversity from every organization that makes this mistake.
It completely nullifies every point they were making.
I remember Google made this same fuck up on a segment in IO when they were talking about how many languages they’re supporting.
It’s disgraceful and just outright disrespectful.
imagine if everywhere you went you saw english test like "helo, how you are?" and all sorts of weird grammatical issues, spaces wrongly inserted. if this was your entire life in the west you'd feel pretty alienated too, especially when people were doing so as an act of 'inclusion'
For what it's worth, I can read Arabic script (but don't speak the language) and I caught the error.
Yet for most English speakers, it is at worst amusing and mostly is just appreciated as indicating interest.
1. Had reverse letter ordering (ltr instead of rtl)
2. Had reverse word ordering (ltr instead of rtl)
3. Had no spaces between words
4. Broke words across line boundaries
5. Made sense semantically (sort of), but didn't make sense in context
kildlouwi
eviecerote
Obfuscated intentionally
Dog park and the more Receive your product Stolen from the following To receive I would like Tire on the other hand Dagger I am not parent Duck to the same role
"[...] we can conclude that learning words from a new language does come at the cost of at least retrieval ease for words in previously learnt foreign languages.’ In one of the experiments, learning the Spanish versions of words also seemed to make participants slightly less accurate when recalling those words in English. [...]"
Although I can confirm the small effect from my own experience, it doesn't faze me. For me, the upsides far outweigh a slight delay in retrieval ease.
[1] https://psyche.co/ideas/will-studying-a-new-language-interfe...
Overall it increases neuroplasticity, best starting as kids when brain is more adaptive. Big gains, regardless if there are some miniscule disadvantages overall.
It’s tricky because some words are exactly the same (just different pronunciation), some are similar (like from the same root). So I hope this is just teething difficulty.
I also recall teachers doing our spoken assessments reminding us the moment before the tape started recording that "remember, French, not German" because both tests took place in the same week and pupils would often launch into the wrong language.
10 years ago, my level of French and English were almost on par to the extent that I didn't even realize what language I was speaking with my parents or siblings (who could also speak both) and would often mix words from different languages based on which one came to mind first.
I took a French class in school (as an easy way to boost my grades) and sometimes the teacher would ask me a question in English and I would accidentally respond back in English instead of French (not realizing it); this amused some of my peers as the questions were usually very basic and therefore awkward to answer in English as anyone could have done so.
I would just respond in whatever language the other person spoke and it took effort for me to consciously answer in a different language than what the other person used.
Tangent: I learned some Japanese years ago. The language made sense to my brain. No writing, just conversation. The same thing did not happen when I attempted to learn Chinese. The way I put it is that my brain simply could not synchronize with the speech pattern and sentence structures. To be fair, I don't think I made a solid effort.
https://lithub.com/haruki-murakami-the-moment-i-became-a-nov...
But I wonder. From the article:
>The foreign language effect does not depend on the particular features of the language that someone speaks; instead, it is concerned with the general experience of moving from a first to a second language.
It feels so weird to me. It feels so weird that according to this, (own example) a Swedish person that learned Norwegian would have similar effect as someone that learned say, Japanese. The latter just so happens to be me. (native in both)
But Norwegian(bokmål) and Swedish(rikssvenska) is so similar that I can hardly believe any "learning a second language" effect occur. If it does, I think claiming that a deep-Texan learning British cockney/posh accent, or Scottish accent, also have the effect mentioned.
Certain languages are just so similar that there's just major overlap. While with others, there's just expressions that is impossible to convey. But here somehow national border based categorization of languages seems to be enough to show the effect?
I can't help but question if this is just one of the psychology bogus like the "decision fatigue" that had ample evidence until it was almost completely disproven.
Is that from the study itself or is it an own example? For what it's worth I'd not consider the pair of Norwegian and Swedish as languages foreign to another. They are basically dialects. The same goes for the pair of German and Austrian imo.
And yes I would consider the same. But if the quoted part is to be believed, the implications are that the same effect occur between Austrian and German, as would Afrikaans to Mongolian
In my native language (English), I can twist and weasel with the language to keep from committing to... anything. It has -- too many degrees of freedom available to me.
With German, though [where I'm intermediate], I don't have that flexibility. My conversations are really straightforward and what comes out is simple enough that I can express it. I'd say that this does come at the cost of understanding and expressing nuance and condition, but maybe that's actually helpful.
Meanwhile talking about work stuff in Slovenian is near impossible because most of my career has been in English. It’s like the concepts just don’t exist in the Slovenian part of my brain.
This gets really trippy when the same word in each language feels like it carries different connotations and baggage. The translation is same but the meaning is different because the correct where you’d use each word is different.
It's even more difficult when a language is spoken in different cultures. Eg, British, American and Australians probably have different connotations associated with the same words. Distinguishing between using a synonym out of custom vs intentionally for a different connotation is very difficult. It's not like there's a connotation dictionary you can refer to.
I have gotten to the stage now where I just accept the decision may turn out to be wrong but it won't be the end of the world if it is, I'm not in charge of anything that dangerous.
I think it's necessary to balance thought with awareness of emotions and intuition. To listen to the gut, which is also an intelligent signal, but doesn't translate to verbal thought.
Thinking more and thinking harder often creates an illusion of some kind of progress or of triangulating on the best decision. And this can be the case, but can also lead to a kind of decision paralysis and/or overconfidence in a decision (I thought really hard about this, so it must be better) when we don't actually have enough underlying knowledge to justify the decision.
If we could measure such a thing, I'd love to see a plot of decision accuracy vs. time spent reaching the decision. This will highly depend on one's deeply ingrained biases. I'm overly pessimistic, so thinking more helps me temper my pessimism and reframe when needed, but thinking too much eventually leads me back to where I started.
Things that are potentially deadly, like flying an aircraft, attempt to remove as much probability as possibly. You make checklists of behaviors before the emergency happens so you think as little as possible.
Or a more inflammatory statement I've been known to say to others "Certainty is for the religious and conmen alike".
So, if one were to choose to learn/renew a language that encourages better thinking, which ones are best? Anyone have any examples with multiple languages and feeling that one or another helped them think better?
(I'm currently choosing a language to learn/relearn among the EU languages, so interested in suggestions - thx)
a) something very different
b) something close (but not too much)
note, words/notions themselves, is different beast from constructs, both may give or take abilities
Honestly it probably doesn't matter all that much. European languages are all pretty connected, in the scheme of things, and have much more in common with each other than you'd expect at first or second glance.
That said, Spanish seems a safe bet, as per tfa. Coupled with the fact that so many people speak it, you could certainly do worse.
I'm currently learning it, with the help of some lion's mane, and it does feel like a worthy pursuit.
If I had to guess at a real answer to your interesting question though, I'd have to guess Russian. They've had a ridiculous amount of high-quality thought and literature, relative to their resources and population size.
I suspect learning a language that is actually substantially different has a more profound effect - so assuming your native language is English - maybe Finnish, Basque or Gaelic?
It is also incredible the extent to which abstract visualization is looked down on by our current academic fashions.
I never did get to that stage but can appreciate the concept.
I'd say it's likely that learning new languages can improve your ability to work in abstract concepts. Something about the different forms of grammar, and deep paradigm shift in outlook implicit in the language (aka Sapir-Whorf). For example, the Mayan languages were fantastic for closely describing nature, compared to English, and (probably as a result) their astronomy was incredible.
Esp if the destination language has a much higher precision for the arguments you are making.