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Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

My SO is Vietnamese and a Bac Si trained in Japan and here, and even she has made similar ESL mistakes.

Some of the tools and dictionaries used for Viet-English are wonky, and depending on when they were educated the English teachers were either unqualified backpackers or some grifter who opened an English tutoring center (oftentimes one and the same).

And coming from a language with little overlap with Indo-European languages and roots makes it a very alien experience (and the same in reverse as well).

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I don't know where "here" is, but yes, translation can be hard. That's fine. It doesn't mean we can't get along or have a peaceful world full of diversity in language and culture. We just need to get better at nuance and understanding.

> where "here" is

California

> It doesn't mean we can't get along or have a peaceful world full of diversity in language and culture. We just need to get better at nuance and understanding

Wasn't making a judgement about that. I was just pointing out a somewhat common mistake and pattern I've noticed Vietnamese ESLers make.

Your reaction seemed very intense and polarizing for what sounded like a funny anecdote of a date gone wrong.

My SO had a similar reaction when she confused "common law marriage" and "civil law marriage" years ago.

Diversity of cuisine, language and lifestyle is great but at the limit peace is a cultural value in itself, you can't always have peace with a culture that doesn't believe you're as deserving of freedom and wellbeing as they are, and there have been plenty of those over history.

> Some of the tools and dictionaries used for Viet-English are wonky

There's basically no real complete English/Viet dictionary anyways, the best ones are 90% there.

LLMs here are the best experience

I love/hate how Google translate assumes "Anh" means "brother" or "em" means "girl".

This confusion has resulted in Vietnamese people unintentionally describing incest or gay relationships.

[0] - What she actually meant was "brother" in the sense that he is a family friend and neighbor.

Yes that's also one of the historical struggles of Google Translate, the pronouns are context based and so are the words, you need experience to know when they start and end.

It's a miserable experience for translation software.

You got downvoted but I know what you are talking about, but there were other ways to write that sentence.

Basically what OP is saying is interpersonal relations can be confused when using the Vietnamese and English definitions of both words.

Anh and Em essentially means masculine and feminine, but is also often used in romantic, non-romantic, casual, and sometimes formal usecases and this is heavily dependent on the verbs and adjectives that follow.

Viet-English NMT is very flawed at the moment.

LLMs are also a mixed bag. The core issue is limited Viet-English corpora aside from what can be found in local government documents in the US and Canada given the huge Viet Kieu community requiring local governments to create Vietnamese language collateral.

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