[HN Gopher] Translatewith.wiki: Translate complicated concepts b...
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       Translatewith.wiki: Translate complicated concepts between
       languages
        
       Author : bo0tzz
       Score  : 79 points
       Date   : 2022-12-28 16:37 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (translatewith.wiki)
 (TXT) w3m dump (translatewith.wiki)
        
       | axpy906 wrote:
       | I was hoping this was programming languages.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | huevosabio wrote:
       | I love this idea.
       | 
       | When I was an exchange student in Germany, I took civil
       | engineering courses in German. Traditional dictionaries were not
       | really useful for filling my gaps of technical vocabulary.
       | 
       | Instead, my approach was to have the German textbook (or course
       | notes), a textbook on the topic in English and Wikipedia open. I
       | would try to go through the German content as far as I could.
       | Often I would be stuck because I did not know some terms, so I
       | would search on Wikipedia and then change the language to
       | English. If the wiki article wasn't enough then I would go to the
       | English textbook and fill in the gaps.
       | 
       | I would have loved to have this then!
        
       | abrudz wrote:
       | I've often done this manually, and have wanted to automate it.
       | Awesome!
        
         | unhammer wrote:
         | Me too, all the time (even by downloading dumps and scripting,
         | long time ago). This is really handy, well done! _bookmarking_
         | :-)
        
       | jtvjan wrote:
       | Oh, neat idea. My go-to for this trick is to look up the Wikidata
       | entry for a concept and look at the table of labels in different
       | languages.
        
       | splatzone wrote:
       | Great idea for a website. I tried it with 'jeopardy', ie the
       | concept of being in perilous trouble, but it only suggested
       | things related to the TV show
        
       | irl_chad wrote:
       | I entered EN to RU simply "distributed systems engineer" and the
       | results were totally off. It returned something about distributed
       | energy management.
        
         | tazjin wrote:
         | It probably just looked up the first match for that literal
         | string in the English wiki, which is the article about
         | "Distributed generation" (of energy).
         | 
         | I asked ChatGPT to translate "Distributed Systems Engineer"
         | into Russian and to explain it. It chose "Inzhener
         | raspredelennykh sistem" as the translation (literal, but
         | fine!), and proceeded to give a spot-on explanation in Russian.
         | 
         | As a polyglot these new language models seem very promising for
         | translation work, especially as well-constrained tasks leave
         | them little room for "hallucination".
        
         | lionkor wrote:
         | Same for EN to DE - something about energy. Completely wrong,
         | but with pictures!
        
         | zeckalpha wrote:
         | That isn't necessarily wrong. Many distributed systems
         | engineers work in the energy sector, which is a giant
         | distributed system.
        
       | paradite wrote:
       | This is not good for nuanced Chinese tech terms, which rarely
       | appears on Wikipedia.
       | 
       | I tried a few terms that I have written about [1], but no
       | relevant results showed up.
       | 
       | https://16x.engineer/2022/10/18/chinese-tech-terms.html
        
         | dejj wrote:
         | Great! Can you add the Chinese sentences of the translation
         | examples too?
        
           | paradite wrote:
           | Oh no. I think I didn't save the sources. Gonna have to find
           | them again.
        
         | zeckalpha wrote:
         | Would Chendian be similar to the English idiom of distilling
         | ideas?
        
           | paradite wrote:
           | Yeah it is quite similar. I will add this. However, chendian
           | lacks the "filtering" aspect of distilling.
        
         | thrdbndndn wrote:
         | Great article!
         | 
         | A small nitpick, I personally don't agree with
         | 
         | > "Maidian literally means "embedding seeds" or "burying
         | seeds"".
         | 
         | Dian, literally speaking, should be point, and it's actually
         | used similarly in English (e.g. 'break point') in this context
         | (and the practice of maidian kinda resembles debugging process
         | too).
        
           | paradite wrote:
           | Yeah good one. I think I actually had "points" originally but
           | removed them for some reason.
           | 
           | Maybe they make more sense as an individual word, but not in
           | a phrase (burying points)? Will have to think about it
           | further.
        
       | iakh wrote:
       | Reminds me of a project I made several years ago to translate
       | different proper nouns into multiple languages:
       | http://adamhwang.github.io/wikitranslator/
       | 
       | Simple open source all client based:
       | https://github.com/adamhwang/wikitranslator
        
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       (page generated 2022-12-30 23:01 UTC)