Re^5: Perl module documentation language conventions

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!

Comment on Re^5: Perl module documentation language conventions

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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
Apparently, your Slavic languages are more similar to Greek which can be considerably reordered without changing the meaning of the sentence, only its focus. Thai, however, is more structured, akin to English. English is better able, on account of being a better developed language, of representing complex thoughts and sentence structures. Thai has no punctuation; though Lao does. I'm a native English speaker; fluent/fully literate in Spanish; conversationally fluent in both Thai and Lao, and able to read both, but my spelling in both is poor; and speak beginning level Chinese--enough to get around town, ask for directions, prices, basic family relationships, etc. I only learned to read about 300 Chinese characters--not enough to read a newspaper, which they say requires about ten times that. But I've forgotten a lot of that now. Presently, I'm learning Biblical Hebrew and Greek, Hmong (which I can read), and a little Karen. I can type Karen (at about 18wpm--it uses the shift key for nearly half the characters), but can't read it! I've been taught just enough (consonants, vowels, etc.) to help locals develop software utilities for spellchecking, word-wrapping, etc. in Karen--tools which never before existed: it's still not in Google's translation list. To the untrained eye, written Karen looks like Burmese--which Google does have in its repertoire; but they are mutually unintelligible. I suppose I could type Burmese nearly as well, but again, I wouldn't understand a word of it. I've learned bits of other languages along the way (like French which I can often understand in written form)--but mostly not enough to be worthy of mention. Including Chinese, where I was more limited, I have taught in five languages--perhaps that's the answer to "what languages do you actually speak?" But I'm only fluent in four. Blessings, ~Polyglot~	[reply]