With the growing trend and use of automatic translations and apps, the need of an "international" language will be over. A new paradigme is coming with better motivations and freedom to learn any language.
What is your opinion about this?
Automatic translation
- Jean-Luc
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Re: Automatic translation
Machine translation has made great strides lately, and definitely has many useful applications, but it is still not completely reliable. It can be a good first pass or approximation of what is being said, and can thus be useful as a learning tool, although I would be somewhat reluctant to sign a machine-translated contract, depend on machine-translated court testimony, or even read a machine-translated novel. I agree it's a new type of resource that we didn't have so readily available in the past.
I don't understand what you mean by there being no need for an "international" language anymore, however. Are you talking about constructed languages like Esperanto? Or maybe you mean English as a lingua franca or bridge language? Having any language in common, whatever it is, is going to facilitate communication; and having a translation app isn't a substitute for actually knowing a language yourself.
I don't understand what you mean by there being no need for an "international" language anymore, however. Are you talking about constructed languages like Esperanto? Or maybe you mean English as a lingua franca or bridge language? Having any language in common, whatever it is, is going to facilitate communication; and having a translation app isn't a substitute for actually knowing a language yourself.
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Re: Automatic translation
Well, a very recent example of the limits of the machine translation:
Le Monde published an article about the eurosceptic parties in various countries before the elections. And when it listed the Czech Republic, it put a party "Yes, we'll erase the europarlament" as the first one. Well, the real translation is more like "Yes, we'll troll the europarlament". It is a joke. A group of people decided to found a party making fun of the clichés about this institution, of the eurosceptic parties, of the main governing party (which has the word "yes" in the name) and basically everybody. The name of the party is part of the joke, so is the presentation video, so are the interviews with the leading candidate (she really did a great job! and made the campaign more bearable)
So, le monde mistook this for a serious eurosceptic party due to machine translation (I doubt any human translator would miss it, the verb "to troll" is in the name). Yes, on our political scene, it is often difficult to tell the jokes apart from the reality (for example some of the real people's social media profiles are even more hilarious than their parodies). We are the nation of the laughing beasts, we'll make fun of anything. Machines don't expect that.
Btw, the joke party got 1,5%, it is getting one million crowns from the state (in most elections here, the parties not getting into the institution at hand but still getting over 1% get some money to help fund their activities and campaign). It may have confused a few voters of the governing party (but that is the fault of the voter, if they cannot tell apart two very different names. Considering the general lack of originality in the political party names, every voter needs this skill. We've got three green parties, several nationalists with similar names, two parties with Moravia in the name, and one party with name taking up majority of the first page of the candidate list, as they basically put their whole program into the name, and that is far from the end of the list of confusing stuff), and it also got more votes than various horrible but serious parties all across the spectrum.
Le Monde published an article about the eurosceptic parties in various countries before the elections. And when it listed the Czech Republic, it put a party "Yes, we'll erase the europarlament" as the first one. Well, the real translation is more like "Yes, we'll troll the europarlament". It is a joke. A group of people decided to found a party making fun of the clichés about this institution, of the eurosceptic parties, of the main governing party (which has the word "yes" in the name) and basically everybody. The name of the party is part of the joke, so is the presentation video, so are the interviews with the leading candidate (she really did a great job! and made the campaign more bearable)
So, le monde mistook this for a serious eurosceptic party due to machine translation (I doubt any human translator would miss it, the verb "to troll" is in the name). Yes, on our political scene, it is often difficult to tell the jokes apart from the reality (for example some of the real people's social media profiles are even more hilarious than their parodies). We are the nation of the laughing beasts, we'll make fun of anything. Machines don't expect that.
Btw, the joke party got 1,5%, it is getting one million crowns from the state (in most elections here, the parties not getting into the institution at hand but still getting over 1% get some money to help fund their activities and campaign). It may have confused a few voters of the governing party (but that is the fault of the voter, if they cannot tell apart two very different names. Considering the general lack of originality in the political party names, every voter needs this skill. We've got three green parties, several nationalists with similar names, two parties with Moravia in the name, and one party with name taking up majority of the first page of the candidate list, as they basically put their whole program into the name, and that is far from the end of the list of confusing stuff), and it also got more votes than various horrible but serious parties all across the spectrum.
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