AW: Breaking barriers

[Mark E. Shoulson]

If I recall correctly, someone has proved that "fully automatic 
high-quality translation" is AI-hard.  Meaning that it's basically the 
same as making a fully aware, human-intelligence AI.  Now, that probably 
depends a lot on the details of "high-quality." There are probably 
sentences and texts one could cook up that a would-be translator would 
need arbitrarily good understanding of the context, situation, shared 
cultural memories and references, etc etc for, and I guess that would be 
what the "proof" was about.  Obviously, machine translation has improved 
in ways nobody(?) would have expected it to when the field was in its 
infancy, and has done it by a completely different method. Instead of 
making more and more sophisticated programs to understand and parse the 
grammars of various languages and build networks of subjects and 
predicates, modern translation, afaik, depends greatly on throwing 
_vast_ amounts of known text into the mix and doing some heavy-duty 
number- and memory-crunching to almost "guess" at what's probably the 
best translation, without necessarily actually "understanding" what it 
means.  (BTW, am I totally wrong about this?)  It seems to me that that 
does have farther to take us, and we'll probably see a lot more 
improvement, but it can only take us so far.  Then again, "so far" might 
be far enough.  If you have a translator whose results are semantically 
satisfactory, say, 97% of the time, and sound only a little 
awkwardnessful to a native speaker in the target language... well, 
customers' standards may be willing to duck a little.

~mark

On 10/21/21 17:11, James Kass via Unicode wrote:
>
>
> On 2021-10-21 9:41 AM, Dreiheller, Albrecht via Unicode wrote:
>> Without understanding the context, Live Translate won't have a good 
>> chance to find the right translation.
>> Machine translation often only pretends to know the meaning but in 
>> fact it fails.
>> I'm not worried about human translators.
> They may be safe in the short-term.  Machine translation is much, much 
> better than it was at the onset.  I recall translating a German web 
> page about the Phaistos disk into English and the page title was 
> translated as "The Discotheques of Phaistos".  (That was a 
> foreshadowing of what to expect in the article, which was amusing to 
> read through.)  Even before machine translation, translations could be 
> humorous.  A French speaking friend once told me that the French title 
> of a certain Steinbeck novel could translate back into English as "The 
> Raisins of Anger".
>
> The web page of Google Translate offers an option for the end user to 
> contribute suggestions for improving the specific translation. This 
> would be expected to make the machine translations better over time.  
> If this option is also offered in Live Translate, which travels around 
> town in pockets and purses and accepts source material from more than 
> plain-text, wouldn't that expedite machine translation improvement?
>
> And what will happen when AI is added to the mix?