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Comment by asveikau | Hacker News Reader

I think any multilingual person will be skeptical of your analysis. Translation is not a substitute for understanding the original. It's good that we have translations, but it isn't the same. As you get into consuming art, literature, poetry, commentary, this is relevant.

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1) But for many people and in many situations, translation---including MT---is good enough. And that overcomes any perceived need to learn another language (which learning may be in opposition to learning something else, something perceived as more important).

2) Most people don't "consume" literature or poetry, and it's unclear to me that non-performance art requires language. (I appreciate Rennaissance painting, but apart from the occasional Latin writing I don't need language to understand it.)

Disclaimer: Besides English, I'm reasonably fluent in Spanish (more so 35 years ago when I last lived in a Spanish speaking country), and used to be reasonably fluent in German, French, Tzeltal and Shuar (and a bit of Italian and written classical Greek). So I have every reason to hope this study is correct. But I have my doubts.

Translation is good enough, but quite often no translation exists. MTL is at this point good enough for simple texts and for everyday living like restaurant menus and shopping, but any even mild complexity in a text, like long-running context (necessary for consistent translation of terminology), puns, purposeful ambiguity, etc., MTL is completely unable to cope with. It just doesn't work and it will likely never work.

Learning a foreign language in order to get more out of art, literature, or poetry is already a very niche hobby and one risks being accused of snobbism or privilege for suggesting it. Art, literature (of the kind where learning the original language could be important), and poetry themselves are niche hobbies.

I don't know your history, but this sounds like a monolingual person not understanding and being arrogant about it. It's not a niche hobby if that's literally your life. Many people are not multilingual as a hobby, or as a choice.

Did you not notice that I specified “developed-country Gen Z above” and also China? That was to leave a carve-out for the still very vibrant everyday multilingualism of the Indian Subcontinent, sub-Saharan Africa, etc. But for East Asia, Europe and most of Latin America, the trends speak for themselves. I am not monolingual, nor are many educated people of my generation, but younger people in my country are likely to learn only English alongside their native language (and then stop being curious).

Someone who can speak English on top of their mother tongue is already multilingual. Anecdotally, people who live anywhere close to a border in Europe tends to speak at least two languages, often more than two, regardless of class or profession.

In Latin America, most countries speak Spanish (with the obvious exception of Brazil and smaller colonies from the other European countries), so the every day pressure to learn another language isn't there and English becomes the "obvious" choice. I don't quite get why you seem to discount English entirely.

There's always been a Lingua Franca. It hasn't always been the same one. There will likely always be one.

they think art is a niche hobby and not the basis of human culture. I wouldn't listen too intently to them.

Art is perennial and omnipresent in human societies, but the sort of art that operates through a language foreign to the aficionado’s own, and learning that language would be beneficial to appreciation of it, is obviously going to be a niche subset of art.

basic puns and rhyming are niche forms of art?

If anything comedy is an excellent way of learning a language: the use of double and triple entendres helps to quickly get exposed to alternate meanings and misunderstandings of words. Comedy aimed at learners or multilinguals can also help, plenty of anglos who learned Spanish can relate to "feeling pregnant" early on :)

Puns and rhyming can generally be translated across languages. I don't think its controversial to say that its possible to get most of what a piece of art is trying to say through a translation.

Puns generally do not translate well.

Where they do, there needs to be a coincidence where words with multiple definitions happen to have the same meanings in both languages, or there happens to be a similar saying in the target language. Often this is not the case. Translators often just make up entirely new material to substitute in for that.

Culture is not only art. An LLM won't help you naturally drop you a "cuidao chacho que toy mu loco" nor "в жёлтом доме по тебе скучают", nor will it translate it into something that carries the exact meaning to you in English, nor reference any equivalent cultural element, for the foreseeable future. You'll need embeddings common life experiences, and even intonation can completely change the meaning even retaining the emphasis.

It will help you communicate, but not partake.

Let me tell you about a little thing called kpop. Korean language courses are booming.

The AI will be able to do all that for you. What you're touching on is the difference between comprehension vs merely being a vessel for information.

I'll give you a very simple example I saw recently. I saw a dad joke in Spanish on social media and it gave me a chuckle. It was a comment to a lawyer's video and it translates to "can I study law if I'm a leftie?" It relies on the fact that law is also a word for "right".

AI won't be able to succinctly translate that joke and have it hit the same way. As an experiment I just fed that into ChatGPT, and it did explain the pun in 6 paragraphs with quotations and a bulleted list, but that kills the simplicity of the humor.

It can't now. It will be able to in the future, when the translation actually becomes fluent for the user.

My point is that a succinct and correct translation for the pun does not exist in the target language.

My point is that the AI will have that info understood as part of "being a translator," and react accordingly. The phenomenon you're describing is a basic fact of linguistics. Many things don't have direct translations, but they are still translated by fluent speakers of both languages.

I am fluent in both languages and I can't succinctly translate it.

If I changed the meaning of the sentence, I could say, "can I study civil rights if I'm a lefty?"

If it were text, I might give you the translation I already gave yesterday and add a footnote explaining the pun.

Neither of these are ideal. One changes the meaning, the other is hard to understand.

Ok, so if a human, which is at the top of this ability to translate, choose this route.

What's the problem with an LLM-translatoin bot doing it? It would just do that, give a possible translation, and explain the issue.

I once saw a political cartoon that said "No votar basura." It played on the homophony between 'votar' = "to vote" and 'botar' = "to throw out."

That said, there are plenty of jokes in English. Stop me if you've heard this one...

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