Timeline for How could real-time sentence translation work if using a "common middle ground" language?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
18 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Apr 18, 2023 at 15:13 | comment | added | AtmosphericPrisonEscape | This is overly protracted and not how human communication works at all. Why would you need this? Do you want to avoid for people having to learn a foreign language? Obviously if you would learn one common foreign language that everyone understands (like.. English, or Esperanto) then you don't need any mental projection shenanigans. | |
| Apr 18, 2023 at 6:04 | vote | accept | maisaur | ||
| Apr 17, 2023 at 20:18 | answer | added | Richard Kirk | timeline score: 0 | |
| Apr 17, 2023 at 8:22 | answer | added | Jani Miettinen | timeline score: 0 | |
| Apr 16, 2023 at 20:34 | comment | added | Stef | This exact problem is addressed in the novel "The Turing Option", by Harry Harrison and Marvin Minsky. | |
| Apr 15, 2023 at 19:50 | answer | added | Daron | timeline score: 2 | |
| Apr 15, 2023 at 3:34 | answer | added | JBH | timeline score: 5 | |
| Apr 15, 2023 at 0:12 | history | became hot network question | |||
| Apr 14, 2023 at 22:17 | answer | added | David | timeline score: 10 | |
| Apr 14, 2023 at 21:36 | comment | added | Pelinore | So that'd be Google translate then, but you translate everything from the first language into a third language and then translate the third language into the end language .. try running random sentences through Google translate from English to Chinese then from Chinese to Welsh and see what you end up with, have fun ;) | |
| Apr 14, 2023 at 19:53 | answer | added | lucasbachmann | timeline score: -1 | |
| Apr 14, 2023 at 18:08 | comment | added | AlexP | @biziclop: It is even worse: pronouns have no lexical meaning and cannot be translated standalone, anyway. What pronoun would be used in a language with grammatical genders depends on what word is replaced by the pronoun . For example, the "her" might be a ship, in which case when translating into French the translation would have to use the masculine form, and the neuter when translating into German. | |
| Apr 14, 2023 at 17:56 | answer | added | AlexP | timeline score: 5 | |
| Apr 14, 2023 at 17:06 | comment | added | biziclop | On top of that, not all languages are equally expressive. We have different colours, different genders, and also just different things. "I saw her standing there" is a simple, short sentence in English, to translate it to my native, genderless language, you'd have to include a multi-word explanation that the person you saw was female. Or you could just ignore it depending on context. But context isn't real-time. (Also related to context, think about how idioms work, how often we use them unthinkingly and how they'd interfere with anything truly "real-time".) | |
| Apr 14, 2023 at 17:05 | comment | added | biziclop | Depends on how "less" you allow in "more or less real time". As a speaker of a topic-prominent language, where word order is not at all pre-determined, I wouldn't fixate on word order too much as an obstacle. Trust me, a far bigger problem is when a speaker starts a long sentence without knowing where they're gonna end up. Because regardless of word order, there are structures that can only be comprehended once the sentence (or the phrase) is complete. So to sum it up: it's possible to do translation with a delay of one or two sentences (it's being done regularly), word order is a red herring. | |
| Apr 14, 2023 at 16:57 | comment | added | AlexP | Tell me that you speak only one language without telling me that you speak only one language. | |
| Apr 14, 2023 at 16:57 | comment | added | Jeff Zeitlin | It seems to me that this would essentially be what happens today in simultaneous translation at e.g., the United Nations. | |
| Apr 14, 2023 at 16:12 | history | asked | maisaur | CC BY-SA 4.0 |