Re: [tlug] Free program translates Euro languages to/from English

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Michael" == Michael Reinsch <mr@example.com> writes:

    >> That said, I guess there is not nearly as much of an issue with
    >> ambiguity in translating most Japanese and Chinese text --
    >> where most of the text is ideograms -- as there is in
    >> translating text that is in a language written in a phonetic
    >> alphabet.

    Michael> I think there are just different ambiguities in Japanese
    Michael> than in English and other European languages, because the
    Michael> cultural background is different. That is what makes
    Michael> Japanese hard to understand and to translate.

Unfortunately, with Japanese it's worse than "different", it's just
plain worse.  Heck, even Mr. Ozawa was complaining about Mr. Koizumi's
inability to say what he means tonight!  Ambiguity, not baseball or
sa-do, is the Japanese national pastime.

It's like the Blondie cartoon where Blondie says "Dagwood, will you
get this from here and put it on top where the other thing is?"
Dagwood of course goes WTF? and gets that withering Blondie "Sometimes
you wonder how men can misunderstand the most obvious things!"  In
Blondie, it's funny; in Japanese, it's good style (not to mention
excellent politics!)

Another thing is that communication in Japanese is extremely
context-dependent, far more so than in English.  You often cannot
translate a statement about social behavior without knowing the
relative statuses of the doer, the do-ee, the speaker, and the
listener.  In fact, you may not even be able to identify the doer and
the do-ee without that knowledge.

My social-science colleagues often complain that although it's
possible to write precise scientific statements in Japanese, the
resulting Japanese is so ugly that even a five-year-old will ask what
planet the author was born on.  Hard-science types are much less
likely to agree, but there are a few.

I don't believe in Yamato-damashii in language (sorry, Mr. Ohta!), but
Japanese definitely is going to be hard.  My linguistics professor
ex-girlfriend whipped me and beat me into submission, so I hasten to
say that Japanese is not inherently any less accurate than any other
language.  All natural languages have equivalent expressive power,
they say.  But I think that Japanese is "designed" for speakers with
large brains capable of bringing huge amounts of context to bear on
even apparently simple communication.  That makes it hard to translate
to or from more context-free languages, and very hard for machines.


-- 
School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
               Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.