[HN Gopher] Canada accidentally helped crack computer translation
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Canada accidentally helped crack computer translation
Author : pseudolus
Score : 81 points
Date : 2022-03-08 11:05 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thewalrus.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (thewalrus.ca)
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| It's strange that in the middle of the article, there's suddenly
| a paragraph about how government requirements on research and
| procurement usually are detrimental. It's like they're saying
| "this story is neat, but let's not forget government is awful."
| At least finish your story before criticizing unrelated things.
| mixedCase wrote:
| How is it not topical to mention that a government-led research
| project failed to accomplish with their own data trove what a
| private organization did with it, when the whole article is
| about that very data and that private organization's
| achievement?
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| That is not the paragraph I'm discussing. I'm talking about
| the one that mentions the "years-long saga of obtaining new
| military jets."
| glorygut123 wrote:
| It's a reference to the Avro Arrow, which is a bitter pill
| in Canadian history for government mismanagement.
| version_five wrote:
| No, it's about the current CF-188 replacement procurement
| and waffling on buying the F-35s.
| version_five wrote:
| As someone who had worked with both research and procurement
| agencies in the Canadian government, I'm surprised the author
| was able to hold their tongue until the middle of the article.
| aaa_aaa wrote:
| OP is right, nevertheless.
| pseudolus wrote:
| Also of note, a number of pioneering studies pertaining to the
| effect of bilingualism on cognition and cognitive development
| were undertaken in Canada as well.
| ggrrhh_ta wrote:
| Also of note, bilingualism/multilingualism is practically the
| norm across the world; monolingualism is almost an exception.
| iratewizard wrote:
| Bilingualism in countries that don't natively speak the
| international language of English.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| Also in plenty of countries that do. Ask anyone from any
| African nation with English as one of its official
| languages.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| The norm is multilingualism across different languages that
| are all local to the area. French people studying English
| in school are not "bilingual" at all, in this sense.
| ggrrhh_ta wrote:
| I was not counting that as bilingualism.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| We have tried to raise our daughter at least with some
| bilingualism, and so had her in French immersion from senior
| kindergarten through to grade 8. In retrospect a mistake for a
| multitude of reasons. I doubt her French will persist well
| beyond her school years and without a community other than
| school to use it in, it's mainly pointless, and many aspects of
| the curriculum were harder than they should have been for her
| because of the language barrier. And after 9 years of immersive
| education she can't listen to a native French speaker and
| understand or watch TV, because French in the real world and
| outside of her classroom is spoken much more quickly and
| accented.
|
| Nevermind that French immersion in Ontario is teaching these
| kids Parisian French and pronounciation, while 25% of the
| population of Canada speaks Quebecois dialect so kids here are
| not learning the French from their own country. Frankly,
| there's a bias in the education system against Quebecois French
| generally which reflects a Colonial era mentality (mother
| country "good" -- and local is a poor imitation, a
| psychological disease that's all over Canada, especially
| English Canada).
|
| All of this ranting is just to bring up the challenges of
| trying to attain bilingualism when you are a native English
| speaker in an English speaking country. In some ways it's a
| curse.
|
| These days I'd mostly prefer to live in Quebec for
| cultural/political/lifestyle reasons. But I was brought up
| unilingual in Alberta (with some German), and never learned
| French beyond half-heartedly counting to 10.
|
| Canada's official bilingualism is mostly a thin veneer that is
| a reality on the ground only in places like Ottawa. Sort of a
| half-hearted half-completed project just to try to put a cork
| in separatism.
| ck2 wrote:
| I thought translation took a leap forward when Google or someone
| figured out to use UN documents which are carefully translated
| from one language to another?
| cbsmith wrote:
| This story seems... slanted.
| melony wrote:
| If it makes those up north feel better, computer translation was
| next to useless for anything slightly complex until Hinton and
| friends figured out deep learning.
| Copper_Abeille wrote:
| Someone from up north. I am not mad, and I don't know anyone
| who is. If freeriding was required to enable a major
| breakthrough, so be it.
| speed_spread wrote:
| Agreed. It means I can claim that my ancestors accidentally
| the languages!
| [deleted]
| barrkel wrote:
| The EU has similar mandates which create corpora across a lot
| more European languages and has also been used for training
| translation models, AFAIK.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Yes, I remember using a translation startup's automated website
| to translate a text to French where "kind regards" were
| translated to "I'd like to thank the president of the EU". I'm
| pretty sure they were using EU documents for training...
|
| I believe other sources include UN documents, which are
| translated into even more languages, and then there are a bunch
| of combined corpora like https://opus.nlpl.eu/ which contains
| hundreds of languages as well.
|
| The obvious downside of this, of course, is that translated
| text often ends up quite official and stiff. Great for reading
| news, translating speeches and reading papers, not so great for
| day to day conversation. There are corpora for more practical,
| specific use for a few languages, but they usually only come in
| pairs.
|
| I don't know how services like Google Translate work now, but
| through experimentation you used to be able to see how the
| translation matrix went through English first when you
| translated between two other European languages. You'd put in a
| word for which the source and destination language had specific
| words, but for which English only had one single word, and
| you'd get a mistranslation every time. The shorter the
| sentences, the more likely the translation service would get it
| wrong.
|
| I just found out this can still be replicated on Google
| Translate, actually: the Dutch word mees (tit, the bird, aka
| titmouse) and the Dutch word tiet (tit, slang for human
| anatomy) both get translated into French as mesange, the bird,
| when you enter them each on a new line. Add more words for
| context ("wat een grote rieten" vs "wat een grote mezen") and
| the translation corrects itself.
|
| I don't believe the French word mesange has any direct
| correlation with mammal anatomy, so clearly the translation
| matrix involves the English language, or af least one with
| similar ambiguities. This is why you can't rely on Google
| Translate if you're just looking for the translation of a
| single word, especially if you're translating between languages
| other than English.
| thomasahle wrote:
| To your point, Google translate still has issues translating
| words for every day objects between Danish and English.
| Probably the same issue arrises for most smaller languages
| with less parallel text.
|
| Just yesterday I wanted to know what an "urtekniv" is called
| in English. Google translate just returned the word
| untranslated. Ironically my second try was to google
| "urtekniv engelsk" and I got an answer from a dictionary:
| https://www.wordsense.eu/urtekniv/
|
| Maybe Google Translate should accept they don't have the data
| to learn stuff like this naturally, and just inject some
| dictionaries into the mix.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Yes, those are good examples on how having data is one thing,
| cleaning the data is another thing entirely
| TillE wrote:
| > Great for reading news
|
| I've found machine translation often does a poor job even
| with news, in European languages. There's just too much
| implicit shared context we don't even think about.
|
| The mistranslated example I remember best is the word "Bund"
| in a German headline, which can mean a lot of things, but in
| context clearly meant the federal government.
| peeters wrote:
| As someone who has watched a few parliamentary sessions, I smile
| at the thought of training computers on those recordings. Ever
| look at a Markov Chain output and think "those are paragraphs of
| text saying nothing at all"? Well, maybe it's closer to the
| humans they're emulating than we thought.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| _Occasionally_ , the translations won't match in a contract or
| law and bilingual legal fun ensues:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/25/business/worldbusiness/25...
|
| Whenever I'm looking for a legal loophole, I'll take a look at
| the French translation of the law.
| yboris wrote:
| I'm baffled that dense contracts with so much money on the line
| do not have better clarification of the terms. It would take
| one or two extra sentences to make intentions clear for both
| parties (e.g. "For example, if neither party notifies the other
| by the end of the 4th year that they do not intend to cancel
| the renewal, the contract will automatically renew for the
| subsequent 5 years").
|
| I'm not a lawyer, but when I was helping write agreements for
| my dad with tenants he had - it seemed like a no-brainer to
| include "this means, if X does not happen by 11:59pm of Y date,
| Z will apply".
|
| ps - I'm angry at any contract agreement where the date can be
| interpreted as "end of day, 11:59pm" or "the day, which starts
| at 0:01am"
| xxpor wrote:
| How many bugs in software result from forgetting to handle an
| edge case?
|
| Not surprising the same thing can happen in contracts;
| they're both written by humans. And you can't unit test a
| contract! (ignoring smart contracts for now)
| mrspuratic wrote:
| In Ireland (ROI), Irish being the first official language of
| the state, constitutionally the Irish language version of a law
| takes precedence (Article 25, 4.6o) over an English language
| version (this applies to the constitution itself also).
|
| Many laws are written in English in the first place though (the
| president can sign either form), sadly it's sometimes a decade
| or more before an official translation is made. A secondary
| problem is the insistence of a defendant to have his trial
| heard in the Irish language, or have Irish forms of the various
| laws/summons/transgressions. We usually call those people "cute
| hoors".
| pseingatl wrote:
| You can play these games within the same language: _See_ ,
| _Regina v. Ojibway_.
| pseingatl wrote:
| Back in the 80's, researchers also worked on the concept of a
| "bridge" language; that is, first translating a text into a
| language with a simple grammar, few homonyms and other beneficial
| traits, and then translating again into the target language. One
| of the bridge languages was Aymara, but then Google's statistical
| model took over. You can almost tell how much material Google has
| to work with. For example, Mandarin<=>English translations are
| pretty good, while Thai<=>English is usually unintelligible.
| mdrzn wrote:
| Thank you Canadians for your hard work!
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(page generated 2022-03-08 23:02 UTC)