Metaglossia: The Translation World

Guardian News

ACCORDING to Crystal Davies, a language conservationist “Languages often hold the only record of a people’s history, including their songs, stories, and ancient traditions. In particular, many indigenous cultures contain a wealth of information about the local environment and its floral and faunal resources, based upon thousands of years of close interaction, experience, and problem-solving.

With the extinction of a language, therefore, mankind also loses access to local understanding of plants, animals, and ecosystems, some of which have important medicinal value, and many of which remain undocumented by science. Thus, the survival of threatened languages, and the indigenous knowledge contained within, is an important aspect of maintaining biological diversity.”

As a teacher in a school, in Lagos Nigeria, I once asked my class if anyone could name the various ethnic groups that make up Nigeria. James Green stood up before anyone could beat him to it. And with a sense of pride, he reeled out “Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba”. He was greeted with cheers from his mates.  And with a sense of fulfillment, he sat.

When I asked which of those tribes he belonged, he thought for a while, rolled his eyes up and down, and replied with a tone of defeat “I don’t know sir”. How sad.

James belonged to the Okrika ethnic group in Rivers State, sadly enough, he didn’t even know this. He only understands and speaks English as his mother tongue, even his name ‘James Green’, contributed in further distancing his little mind from his cultural identity; his parents ofcourse failed to transmit to him, a clear cultural and linguistic identity, which is one of the fastest ways to kill a culture. In this way, Nigeria has lost a good number of her indigenous languages, and many more, according to the National Geographic Society, are on the brink of disappearance.

When you start an interpreting course one of the first things you that may strike you is how the language you thought you knew just fades away. Interpreting is an extremely complex exercise and your language skills have to be extremely solid. Whether we grew up bilingually or learnt languages later, most of us who are (or were) accepted into an interpreting program probably has the equivalent to a C2 level (mother tongue or near-native level according to the Council of Europe). But let’s face it, when we embark on our first consecutive – it feels like we just learnt our first words in that language.

So, although you are a skilled linguist, you will have to work on enhancing your language skills, and probably also the elusive concept of ‘culture générale’. But how do you do it? Since we’re not C3PO we cannot just add another hard drive or software, we just have to do it the good old way. And you probably already know it, but here’s a repetition.

Have you ever wondered why the British spell “color” with a “u” and Americans don’t? Or why the British spell “theater” with an “re” at the end and Americans spell it with an “er” at the end? We all know that these spelling differences exist, but not everyone knows why they exist. Today, we’re going to find out!

It turns out that Noah Webster of Webster’s dictionary fame is behind many, but not all, of the spelling differences between British and American English, and his reasons for making the changes were as much political and philosophical as linguistic. I was inspired to do this podcast by a book I just finished, called The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster’s Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture by Joshua Kendall. I know many of you reading are not Americans, but I hope you will indulge me and end up finding this story as interesting as I do.

Early America

Noah Webster lived smack in the middle of the time when Americans were still trying to form a country and figure out who they were. To give you some perspective, the United States Constitution was ratified between the time Webster published his first spelling book and when he started working on his famous dictionary.

Americans were eager to break with Britain as fully as possible and weren’t even sure that English should be the primary language. Nearly 10% of the population spoke German, so some people suggested German should be our language. Others proposed Hebrew, and others thought we should call our language Columbian.

“Zee” Versus “Zed”

Noah Webster's influence is why Americans call the final letter "zee" instead of "zed."
Webster undertook his first big project--an American spelling book to replace the British book schools were then using--in part, to settle the matter and convince people that our language should be English, but American English. It was in this book that he took small steps to begin creating American spellings. It was also in the speller that he taught Americans to pronounce the name of the final letter of the alphabet as “zee” instead of “zed” as the British do.

A few milestones in the short but storied history of machine translation: in 1939, Bell Labs presented the first speech synethesizing device, the Voder, at the World's Fair in New York. In 1978, the first spoken words were transmitted across the Internet. June 2012 saw the release of VoiceTra4U-M, an iPhone app developed by the global Universal Speech Translation Advanced Research Consortium (U-STAR) which enables voice translation of 13 different languages.

Today's translation machines, both written and spoken, "are extremely clever and give us a lot reasons for thought about what language is and how we may understand language better, but the way they work bears little resemblance, in fact, no resemblance at all to the way human beings both speak," says David Bellos, a translator and director of the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication at Princeton University.

Watch the interview:

Computers decode and reproduce spoken human language in much the same way they translate written language -- by effectively transcribing the speech in the source language into text and putting it through a translation device which "sounds out" the text, "just like your telephone answering device does." (This feature is used and will, says Bellos, always be used in machines that simulate speech translation.) Software translation programs like Google's, Yahoo's, and Microsoft's are essentially statistical engines. Programmers use data to train their algorithms on human-translated parallel texts so that they automatically "learn" how to translate.

Over the years, the technology has become more sophisticated, but speaking to an automated voice on the other end of the line is still an exercise in frustration. The results of programs like Google Translate are notoriously comical. Here, for instance, is Hamlet's famous "To be or not to be" soliliquy translated from the original English to Chinese, back to English again via Google Translate:

Or not, this is a problem:
Whether this is a noble mind suffer
Outrageous slings and arrows of Fortune
Or take up arms against a sea of troubles,
And opposing the closure, after they die, to sleep
A sleep to say we end
The heart of pain, as well as countless other natural shocks
This flesh is heir to it?

As Phil Blunsom, a researcher at Oxford University, told the BBC, "the time when a computer can match the interpretive skills of a professional is 'still a long way off.'"

What's the Significance?

The limitations of machine translation are indicative of the broader historical limitations of symbolic A.I. Early researchers regarded both the human brain and human language as systems of explicit rules which could be pinned down, catalogued, and unlocked -- but despite a few breakthroughs in the field, we've still not come close to building a brain or decoding the nuances of language. Perhaps the problem is more than technological. Perhaps it is unsolvable.

Why? "You possess a skill that hardly any computer programme does," explains the author of a 2009 paper from the University of Copenhagen. In studies, people are able to pick up on subtle distinctions in the meanings of words that computer systems always miss, for example:

(1.1) (a) The command interface defines a single method called “execute” that is invoked by the
internal CommandExecutor when a command is to be executed.

(b) An Iranian cleric, Hojatoleslam Rahimian, called today for the leaders of Iran’s
opposition Green Movement to be executed.

Google Translate and the automated phone operator fall flat when they try to understand passages that contain complexity and variation -- abstract ideas, shifts in tone, words that mean more than one thing. That's why Bellos believes machine translation will always require the existence of human translators.

Still, he says, machine translation has great potential to expand our sense of the possibilities of communications, as civilization grows increasingly global. "The way airplanes fly resembles not at all the way birds fly. It doesn’t have to. What you want is the flight."

The overall picture is this. The more machine translation there is the more translation will happen, the more people will expect to be able to communicate with other folk and the more they will realize that although machines can clear the ground the actual translation has to be done by somebody because language is human behavior. It’s machine simulated, but they’re not doing anything like what a human translator is doing.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

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Argolian
How do you translate a lie?

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2 hours ago 1 Like

HudsonPop Thinker Specializing in Strategy, Systems Architecture & Innovation, Business Troubleshooting and Brainstorming, Computational Linguistics and Intelligence.
Clearly what is needed is software that can naturally perform Language Comprehension. The common place word-for-word transposition (statistical) approach is laughable and will only ever fail.

Although it was a little unfair giving text from Shakespeare to Google Translate since nobody speaks as they did 400 years ago. Always good for a laugh though. Which I think reinforces my first point, that the statistical approach just doesn't work well enough.

To approach a solution, developers need to know a couple of things: 1) Robotics is a silly wasteful way to approach the development of intelligent entities. 2) You don't need super powerful computers to perform the computations needed to achieve comprehension. What we've got right now is more than enough.

As for the question of ambiguity, and this is a tough one for humans to accept, - deal with it. It goes with the intelligence territory. Just as physics has to deal with spooky quantum mechanics, so humans trying to get by in the world have to deal with ambiguity. This means that when you buy your super-duper language comprehending doo-dah it will still suffer the same issues that any human would when it comes to trying to understand what...

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15 hours ago

jbucher
What has become clear to me after a career of teaching medical transcription and transcribing surgical procedures is that this field is not the ideal one for voice recognition software. I am bothered that there is not more concern with the machine bungling such phrases as "a mass the size of an orange" (the final copy reading, "the size of an RN).
And yes, this copy passed through the editor. I believe there is a place for VRS in the workplace, but only if it is accurate. We are still human beings with human needs.

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21 hours ago 1 Like

Megan EricksonPop Thinker Megan Erickson is Associate Editor at Big Think, and has worked as a tutor and teacher at several NYC public schools.
Good point--computers are better at catching technical errors, whereas human beings are better suited to interpretation.

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0 minutes ago in reply to jbucher

Patrick ElliottPop Thinker
Cyc. There have been projects, like this, which use statistical interpretations, and the ability to process through new words, and old, to find contextual, and other connections. The problem with them end up being a) storage, b) lookup, and c) processing speed. Due to the fact that the means by which words are stored is based on letters, and do use lookups like that, all of these become a problem. In fact, Cyc can be used as OpenCyc, to build a bot, but it a) doesn't learn like the original, b) the data system is a mess to understand, and c) you have to practically program the things understanding of the language from near scratch, due to it not having a way to learn directly, with the result that you might as well be using an Alice bot. It "should" be smarter than that, by a wide margin, but unless you have 5 years to teach it, it never will be, and by the time it is.. it will become unwieldy, slow, and unstable.

Maybe what needs to be done is working on things from the other angle - Have the machine process words as sound, which can...

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1 day ago

marlem388Pop Thinker
Computer decoding could develop a database to categorize what words in a particular context refer to--animal, vegetable, mineral, etc.
But this strategy probably would work only in translating texts that are mainly pragmatic and do not rely on metaphors to highlight their points.
I see a basic difficulty in translating language and phrases that have multiple meanings (ambivalent or multivalenced words), such as--
"He ratted to the company chair";
"She's fit as a fiddle."
Decoding would also have to find a way to include word play like puns, slang, and wit.
Idiomatic forms of language don't yield well to mechanical forms of translation.

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1 day ago 1 Like

Mr. Zychowski I am the light!
We as humans no longer are able to make machines on our own. Machines are already made by machines, it is not unreasonable to think that a master machine will start coding machines as well. Once that happens the singularity will take over and artificial intelligence will take over the planet. The only thing we need to ponder is weather it will be a good assimilation or bad. Similar to a Start Trek computer or a Terminator. Perhaps it will be both with integration into the biological, some sort of cyborg. These might be the last generations of homo sapiens as we know them. I can't wait to see how it will turn out.

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1 day ago

Ken Kendrick
I mean to say that a machine cannot be entitled with the level of capability measured from how he performs with the code given.

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1 day ago

Ken Kendrick
The capabilities of machines depend on the capabilities of humans to program. Machines can work better than humans with better code.

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1 day ago

ReptillianPop Thinker
Bah to the idea that translation always will require a human. As if there were something magical, or spiritual, or non mechanical in our use of language. The problems and obstacles faced aren't fundamental, it's simply a matter of increasingly complex programming and processing power.

Look at the example given with the word 'execute'. The difference in meaning is in what the word is referring to in each sentence. 'Execute' means something different when it is applied to a person instead of an object like a computer program. Perhaps a program which examines the subject, object, and verb in each sentence and classifies subjects and objects as "person, place, or thing" and verbs as "action, linking, or auxilary" would have more luck interpreting and translating. You could rank words in the sentence on importance, then compare to words in the other language.

The alternative is to create a database of human translated phrases, then once an exhaustive database is created; the machine can choose the appropriate translation from the list. That wouldn't be as hard as one might think. Especially since most humans may know thousands of words and phrases, but only use a fraction of them regularly. For the...

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I must admit, somewhat shamefully, that in the past I have been woefully mistaken about diversity in the United States. What I pictured in my mind was a more or less homogeneous sea of blonde-haired, fair-skinned people. Later, I realized that darker-skinned people also called it home. I had, of course, also seen some other people in movies – people with long braided hair, wearing colorful feathered headpieces. I knew these people as Red Indians (which I later realized was politically incorrect – at that time I thought it rather odd, since these Red Indians looked neither red nor Indian) and never gave a thought to who they really were or what became of them. To my credit, I was only a child and grew up on the other side of the world much before Facebook and Google were born.

Coming from a part of the world where mono-ethnicity is the norm, I can understand why we thought that other countries were the same. We all looked more or less alike, so why should things be different elsewhere? Many, many years later, I experienced a blast of diversity – cultural, ethnic, racial, lifestyle-related, you name it – when I lived/worked in Honolulu and New York City. But not too long ago, I got food for thought when someone (who has never been out of their home country before) asked me if the dark-haired woman sitting in front of us was American. “Why, yes”, I said. “But, aren’t Americans blonde?”. In that moment, I realized my own ignorance – I had witnessed but a drop in the ocean of diversity, as Elizabeth Little proves in her road trip, Trip of the Tongue: Cross-country travels in search of America’s languages (2012).

A self-confessed language fanatic, Little drives over 25,000 miles pursuing answers to linguistic mysteries:

Why do some languages last while others fade away?…How, ultimately, has the language experience affected the American experience?…why language communities in the United States have, again and again and again, eventually yielded to the seemingly implacable preeminence of English.

What is the language experience in America like? To say that the language of America is English, is a bit like saying Americans are blonde. American language, American English if you will, is the result of the co-mingling of different tongues, that happened (and is continuing to happen) at various phases in the nation’s history. European colonization of America brought into contact European languages with Native languages; slavery added African languages to the mix; and immigration, past and recent, is continuing to add more into the pool. Little’s cross-country travels look at each of these phenomena, their influence on American English, as well as the fate of these other languages and the mechanisms of language loss, death and preservation.

Colonization and the native peoples

…it’s almost easy to overlook the fact that American English owes much of its distinctiveness to words it has acquired in the New World.

Firstly, “all Native peoples are not, in fact, part of one big, homogenous culture”, and all Native personal names are not “of the verb-preposition-animal variety”. Sources suggest, says Little, that anywhere between 250 to over 400 languages were spoken in the pre-contact population of North America, and around 175 indigenous languages are spoken in the United States. That, however, doesn’t mean that these surviving languages are in any way mainstream, or are spoken by substantial numbers of people. I am not sure I have heard a conversation in even one of them. What contributed to the decline of these languages?

Language is inevitably conceived with cultural and usually ethnic heritage. It has been described as the soul of every culture of a people.
Language is also an essential source of a peoples collective consciousness since there are certain experiences which may be only comprehensible to people who speak the same language .Linguists find a close and dynamic relationship between language and thought. For it is in language that custom, tradition, ethics poetry, history, religion and rituals are incarnated.
It is therefore a step in the right direction when UNESCO in Nov. 1999 instituted the International mothers language Day. The Day seeks to bring to the fore strategies nations should adopt to preserve the various indigenous languages and cultural diversity.
Prior to formal education, our forefathers used the mother tongue which is the indigenous language in a variety of ways to train their children.
Unfortunately, with the advent of formal education much attention has been focused on English Language; the lingua franca of the country to the detriment of the mother tongues. This unfortunate situation has led to Ghanaian languages being marginalized.
The migration of Ghanaian to western countries is also a contributing factor to the lost of Ghanaian languages, and culture; since most parents abroad do not communicate with their children in their local languages.

WHETHER "data" is singular or plural is one of those hardy perennials of usage debate in which both sides have impossibly entrenched positions. Or so I had thought, but the Wall Street Journal has, as of today, taken an unusually fence-sitting position:

Most style guides and dictionaries have come to accept the use of the noun data with either singular or plural verbs, and we hereby join the majority.As usage has evolved from the word’s origin as the Latin plural of datum, singular verbs now are often used to refer to collections of information: Little data is available to support the conclusions.Otherwise, generally continue to use the plural: Data are still being collected.(As a singular/plural test, try to substitute statistics for data: It doesn’t work in the first case — little statistics is available — so the singular is fails to pass muster. The substitution does work in the second case — statistics are still being collected – so the plural are passes muster.)
I admire the attempt to satisfy both tradition and change, but it does leave some leeway that I can imagine many writers having a hard time handling. People crave hard and fast rules: they don't have time to make judgments all the time, like the suggested route of substituting "statistics". (This is the first time I've heard of this remedy, for what it's worth.)

But hard-and-fast doesn't always work, as I noted in my last submission on "data". We don't use the foreign morphology of every word brought from a foreign language. But we do sometimes. Since that last post, I have found this excellent one supplying some new counterarguments against always-plural "data". Among them: we certainly don't use "agenda" and "stamina" in the plural, though they have come to us the same way "data" has. (If your boss ever does say "moving on to the next agendum", let us know.) The "media" question remains mixed: some have it singular, others have it plural.

We have a strong urge to just have language behave, but regular readers of this column know that, as the original Johnson knew, it just won't. He famously said that "to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride". Less well known, but perhaps more to the point, he pointed to the unruliness of language as the sign of a healthy culture constantly enriching itself:

Letting languages disappear is a crime against humanity, asserted a recent article.

....

There are scientific reasons why linguistic diversity is important. Linguistics and cognitive sciences study how the brain processes language and thought; such sciences try to determine what language is, and what combination of influences affects its structures: intelligence, environmental factors,innate factors. The more languages available to study, the better the science will be. As well, 75 per cent of plant-based pharmaceutical drugs we use were discovered though practitioners of bush medicine, whose medical knowledge had been passed on in languages which are now dying, along with such traditional knowledge.
But that’s not why we should care about language death. If we are able to simply step off a plane and hear a speaker of our language and sigh in relief, finally feeling that we are home, perhaps it is difficult to imagine not having such an essential pleasure. The despair of Indigenous people around the world is that their right to belong, to have an identity, which, for many, is located in language, is constantly under threat. And their efforts to preserve such culture are belittled.

Read more: http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=32073

The Inuit people will now have access to the entire Bible in Inuktitut, the most widely spoken Aboriginal tongue in Canada’s Arctic.
The translation project began in 1978, with the New Testament published in 1991, and the Old Testament translation recently completed. The $1.7 million Inuktitut project was co-sponsored by the Canadian Bible Society and the Anglican Church of Canada.
The work was spear-headed by Rev. Eugene A. Nida, considered the father of modern Bible translation. Rev. Jonah Allooloo, an Inuk priest and canon of the Anglican Church of Canada worked on the project from the start.
Nida, who died in September 2011, introduced the concept of “functional equivalence” rather than literal translation. He believed that truly accessible translations can only be done by native speakers who know not only the language, but the idioms, thought processes and culture of their people. The translations should read naturally while remaining faithful to the original meaning and message.
In the past, translations were done by missionaries. Though they learned the language, the literal translations were often stilted and awkward.

Language isn’t innate, Daniel L. Everett argues. It’s a tool that can be reinvented, or lost.

....

How humans learn language is much more easily accounted for by psychologists than the Chomskyans claim. Surely our brains and bodies have evolved to optimize our language abilities. However, no one supposes that our skill on bikes indicates a “bicycling organ.” Rather, language piggy­backs on vocal apparatuses and regions of the brain that evolved for other purposes in our animal forebears. Everett makes a case for language having arisen as a combination of three elements: “Cognition + Culture + Communication.”

“Language: The Cultural Tool,” full of intellectually omnivorous insights and reminiscences about Everett’s years with the Pirahã (which he memorably described in “Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes”), is that rare thing: a warm linguistics book. The quiet smile perfusing his writing is all the more admirable given the criticisms he has endured from linguists wedded to the He-jumping school of thought. This nonconfrontational quality has its disadvantages, though. Everett covers Chomskyan syntax largely in passing, referring to it as “highly technical” and choosing not to dwell on its machinery, even to the extent I have here. This saps his argument of a certain force. To the uninitiated, “technical” alone may sound innocuous and even attractive, not like something to argue against for 300 pages.

What is the one legendary story you wish to be told when you are gone? No doubt, something fantastic. None of us want to be remembered for things said in angry rants or the idiotic slurs on an evening of lost inhibitions. If you were given the opportunity to open your mouth and let words of pure brilliance escape, then capture them in a time capsule, what would you say? Can you imagine sharing a piece of history in the words you spoke with your ancestors, while sharing a shred of your wisdom with future generations? Every spoken word, every written word is a link, insight to where your people have come from and evidence of what you’ve contributed to mankind. How sad would it be if no one remembered you at all? In many cultures around the world, the moment the last elder dies, no one ever speaks their story again. “Every 14 days another language dies “ (World Oral Literature Project).

The Arctic Inugguits are a group of people who live in the North of Greenland. Until they were discovered in 1818, they thought that they were the only inhabitants of the world. Their entire culture is based on storytelling. The climate change has forced them to migrate and assimilate into more dominant cultures of the north. No children and young adults have learned the native language, and when their last elder dies, so too will their history. For this reason, Stephen Pax Leonard spent over a year living amongst the Arctic Inugguits, recording their songs, traditions and myths. (Leonard 32)

In celebration of language diversity worldwide, International Mother Language Day is celebrated annually on February 21. The event encourages people to maintain their knowledge of their mother tongue while learning and using more than one language.

In every society, conduct, culture, and values are strongly related to the language spoken. Literature is the mirror of culture in society and literature is based on language which plays a main part in man’s social life.

The mother language is the medium of one’s inner thoughts and reflections. Thought and language are interrelated and for acquiring knowledge, the mother tongue is the best medium. As sources of creativity and vehicles for social expression, mother languages along with linguistic diversity matter for the identity of individuals and vital for the health of societies. It opens opportunities for dialogue necessary for understanding and cooperation. As wellsprings of knowledge, mother languages are starting points for greater sustainability in development and growth endeavors, and for managing more harmonious relationships with the environment and change.

Title: Norwegian Translator in South Africa

Language is a thought process which is influenced by culture and surroundings, many words are region specific and their inferred meaning is totally different from the dictionary meaning.