Re^4: Perl module documentation language conventions

In Biblical language, there is no pronoun deviation between persons based on status of any type, only by gender or number. There is, of course, the familiar versus the formal, but, for example, this does not affect the language used either by or for God. This is unlike several of the Asian languages which have "royal language" that must be used for deity or royalty, and which is entirely distinct from that of the commoners' language. If Google Translate detects Biblical language, it will adjust the pronouns accordingly; but there is a threshold of similarity to the Biblical text beneath which this adjustment is not made.

But there are so many differences in languages. Thai and Lao, for example, simply do not have all of the vocabulary which English has, including a number of the key "glue" words that give basic structure to the grammar. For some examples, the following words have no translation equivalent: of, lest, neither, nor, either, never, etc. There is no such thing as verb conjugations, so certain concepts, such as the future perfect tense in English, are not translatable. There is no such thing as plurals, so distinguishing between a singular form and a plural form requires additional words. There is no such thing as articles (a, an, the), but there is such a thing as a noun classifier word, which varies by item and has no English equivalent.

Some words are surprisingly absent, seemingly along with their entire concept: ignore/ignorance, brother/sister (must specify if older/younger), sibling, parent (must specify father/mother), etc., and some words diverge that are unified in English, such as grandfather/grandmother (two words, one for paternal, one for maternal). Machine translation cannot possibly add information that did not previously exist in the source language, but it is forced to guess; so "brother" becomes "younger brother" and "grandma" becomes "mother's mother," etc. when translating from English. Even a human translator is forced to make these same calls, of course, so this is not a criticism of the machine translation so much as of the potential accuracy for such a translation in the first place. The machine will not ask for clarifications as a human translator might, where the opportunity exists.

The lack of the word "of" is one that irritates me. Bible translations here, for example, may translate "And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me" (Matthew 10:38) to something like "the one who does not receive his cross and follow me is not worthy." The "of me" is simply not translated, because...what else would it be? "for me"? "to me"? "from me"? "about me"? "by me"? "in me"? This issue with the Biblical translation holds true with multiple Asian languages, including Thai, Lao, Malay, and Bengali--none of these languages has a true equivalent for "of."

Blessings,

~Polyglot~

Comment on Re^4: Perl module documentation language conventions

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Re^5: Perl module documentation language conventions by Jenda (Abbot) on Oct 24, 2023 at 14:28 UTC
Erm ... there is no translation of the "of" to Slavic languages either, most times it just causes the word that follows to be in the genitive case, but there is no way to translate it as a separate word other than by an explanation and a list of prepositions that might in some cases be also necessary in combination with possibly a different case. But that doesn't mean that the meaning of its use in the sentence can't be translated! If I take translate that sentence to Thai by Google Translator and then the result back to English by Bing, it becomes "And those who do not accept their crosses follow Me. He doesn't deserve us." Clearly the translators got the sentence structure wrong, but "he doesn't deserve us" and "... is not worthy of me" really doesn't look like the "of me" got lost. The translation made it plural, but the meaning is there! "deserve something" and "be worthy of something" is prettymuch the same thing. Translating each word as a separate unity might work between very closely related languages, like say Spanish and Portuguese, but in all other cases it's nonsense. You are right about the need to make up information that can't be omitted. No need to go all the way to Asian languages though, there is no sensible way to omit the gender from "I sung" translated to a Slavic language (except the weird and not really functioning as a Slavic language Bulgarian). Jenda 1984 was supposed to be a warning, not a manual!	[reply]
Re^6: Perl module documentation language conventions by Polyglot (Chaplain) on Oct 24, 2023 at 23:30 UTC
That's very interesting that the Slavic languages have similar grammatical issues--thank you for sharing. Regarding: "And those who do not accept their crosses follow Me. He doesn't deserve us." ...that is entirely different in meaning to the original text. Notably, Jesus was speaking of those who took up their cross as being the ones who followed him, whereas this translation has made it the other way around, saying they would follow him by not accepting their crosses! Total reversal in meaning is not uncommon with machine translation between European and Asian languages, and this provides a good example of it. The "of me" is also badly butchered, even if you might like to think it's not so far different in meaning. I will respectfully disagree. I think saying "he doesn't deserve us" is rather different than him saying we are not worthy of him. The focus has changed from one person to another, and the concept of "deserve" has been extraneously added. It would be nice if machine language translation were more reliable; but alas! It is what it is, and real human translators are still in high demand. It is of note that most translation services which employ freelance translators absolutely forbid machine translations to be used by their translators. There is good reason for this. Blessings, ~Polyglot~	[reply]
Re^7: Perl module documentation language conventions by Jenda (Abbot) on Oct 25, 2023 at 10:54 UTC
It's not a grammatical issue, it's not needing those glue words because the same information is encoded in the suffixes of the words. Which by the way frees the languages from the sily fixed order of the English sentence. As we can tell the subject from the object by the form of the word, we can order them whichever way we want, based on what's the new information we want to stress ... or leave as a surprise at the end. Which is something you'll inevitably lose when you translate the sentence to English, no matter whether you actually know the language or use a program Yes, the meaning's butchered, but not because of the inability to represent the "of me". That one did stay there. It's because the sentence structure did not survive the translation to Thai well enough and it's translated back as if there was a fullstop, not a comma. The "He" in the last sentence of the back translation is the person that did not follow, while the "us" is the deity. Or maybe not, seems to me neither of us actually knows any Thai. Would you mind a question? What languages do you actually speak? Not like "have read about", but actually are able to converse in at least on a basic level. Jenda 1984 was supposed to be a warning, not a manual!	[reply]
Re^8: Perl module documentation language conventions by Polyglot (Chaplain) on Oct 25, 2023 at 12:06 UTC