Translatability Between Languages

[VerbalAbuse]

Can you really translate from a language to another? An earlier thread was claiming that.
In truth -- not really. Leaving aside technical and legal texts, a lot is lost in translation -- style, humor, emotion, politeness, tone.
Romance languages are said to be highly expressive and emotional. English and German are said to be direct. Chinese -- nobody knows.
Do you really read the original story when reading a translation? Many don't believe so. Some learn another language for the express purpose of reading the real story. Examples abound. Tolkien for once learned Finnish to read Finnish texts.

Can a table of translatability be put together? Quantifying how easy a language translates into another is not a simple job, and the answer can't be a number. But here's a table, nonetheless -- as wrong as any such table can be.


So English translates to Spanish no better than a 8. Spanish to English significantly worse: only a 6.
English to Chinese: forget about it.

Now, if you ask me, French is hardly translatable to English -- too much of its character is lost in translation. Sure, you get the facts -- if there are any, but the character, the flair, the feeling -- all gone.

 

[StillStunned]

I frequently work with translators, including some very good ones. And I agree that 100% translation is largely impossible. Even if the languages are very closely related there will always be differences in culture, connotation and background. Even with legal texts, for example, you have to transpose concepts from different legal systems.

And this is why translators own the copyright to their translations, unless they waive it as part of the contract. And it's why translators are being credited as co-authors. And why there are now awards for best translations.

And it's not before time. Translating is an incredibly difficult job, that requires a perfect command of two languages, the ability to write, an understanding of two cultures, and a nitpicky eye for detail. And, for the poor souls working in business translation, an acceptance of the fact that 90% of their work will never be read by anyone.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Translating books, stories, poems is art unto itself. I never even considered writing my stories in my own language and then translating them. It would be like writing them all over again.

There are many expressions, sayings, and nuances in each language that don't translate well - you can only approximate them by choosing a close enough expression from the target language. But that requires knowing both languages intimately. And by intimately I mean knowing the slang, the popular language, abbreviations, tech-talk, online lingo...
Ugh. I have no wish to be a translator.

 

[Voyeurkenneth]

Movie translations must be tough. I wonder if the director oversees every language translation of their film.

 

[Omenainen]

Tolkien for once learned Finnish to read Finnish texts.

Yes! You should all do that and then we could write our erotica in Finnish. For once I’d have a head start.

 

[StillStunned]

Yes! You should all do that and then we could write our erotica in Finnish. For once I’d have a head start.

I'd love to learn Finnish (and Icelandic). Unfortunately I'm still struggling with Spanish, and needing to brush up my German occasionally as well.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Movie translations must be tough. I wonder if the director oversees every language translation of their film.

I remeber a line from Star Wars Episode II, if I am not mistaken, that said: "The shuttle has landed in the assembly yard." I remember it being translated as if the shuttle landed in front of the parliament, when in fact the shuttle landed in the factory yard where the droids were being assembled.
Funny error, and even in something so high-profiled such as a Star Wars movie.

 

[XerXesXu]

I've mentioned this in another thread, but it's worth repeating; LLM AI Agents speak many languages, but all as a second language. Bear this in mind when constructing your prompts.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

I've mentioned this in another thread, but it's worth repeating; LLM AI Agents speak many languages, but all as a second language. Bear this in mind when constructing your prompts.

Do you think that English is also second language to LLMs in this sense?

 

[grey228]

Can you really translate from a language to another? Romance languages are said to be highly expressive and emotional. English and German are said to be direct. Chinese -- nobody knows.

I know.

Spoken Chinese has two large groupings- Mandarin and Cantonese, with village / regional dialects branching off from them (there can be literally scores of dialects).

One you write in Chinese however, anyone literate in it will be able to understand you, because the written form of a Chinese is kinda universal across the areas it's used in. There are two forms of written Chinese — traditional and simplified. The latter was introduced by the Chinese Communists to let people learn to read/communicate (and which I suspect - but not 100% sure - curate some terms; some terms exist in Taiwanese Mandarin that aren't around on the mainland).

Traditional Chinese calligraphy was still what's used for any old texts the CCP and older dynasties didn't destroy when they took over the country. For a time, any country with a Chinese population learned traditional characters, so they knew how to read both traditional and simplified, but that is less of the case now. Google translate is able to do both, but I prefer traditional, just out of spite.

 

[XerXesXu]

Do you think that English is also second language to LLMs in this sense?

Yes. That becomes very obvious as you use them.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Yes. That becomes very obvious as you use them.

I am inclined to agree, although some languages are "more second" than others. It makes sense I suppose, considering the amount of data available for training.

 

[Jorunn]

I remeber a line from Star Wars Episode II, if I am not mistaken, that said: "The shuttle has landed in the assembly yard." I remember it being translated as if the shuttle landed in front of the parliament, when in fact the shuttle landed in the factory yard where the droids were being assembled.
Funny error, and even in something so high-profiled such as a Star Wars movie.

Translators need to read the whole story first and not try to translate one thing at a time. Then, get a beta reader who is fluent in the ‘to’ language.

 

[Jorunn]

I'd love to learn Finnish (and Icelandic). Unfortunately I'm still struggling with Spanish, and needing to brush up my German occasionally as well.

No you don’t. I tried learning Finnish but never got too far past tourist level. Hungarian is just as hard too.

 

[ronde]

A great deal of the problems with translating English to any other language and translating any other language into English and vice versus is the English language itself. English is not a "pure" language. It's a witches brew of many languages absorbed over the centuries of conquest of the British Islands by people who spoke different languages. The British Isles were connected to Denmark and the Netherlands by a land bridge up until about 8,000 years ago. As those people migrated to the British Isles, they brought their language with them and served as the base for English. Through the centuries, the British Isles were invaded and conquered by the Romans who added Latin to the mix, then the Germanic Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. The name "English" has it's roots in "Englalonde" which means "Land of the Angles". This was shortened over the years to "England" from whence was born the name "English". Gaelic was stirred in when the Irish invaded. The Danes invaded in the 9th Century and the Normans in the 10th bringing both Danish and several French dialects along with them.

The result is a language with very few hard and fast rules of grammar and a lack of words that indicate gender. The meaning of many words in other languages are context dependent, meaning the same word in Italian, for instance, can mean different things based upon the context in which it is used. Throw in technical jargon and translation becomes a lost cause. In English, we would hold a drill bit by the "shank". In French, it's a "tail".

Erotica presents another set of problems in that the meaning of some words has changed significantly over time. For instance, "pussy" probably was derived from the Old Norse word "puss" which meant a "pouch", but in the 16th Century was a tear of endearment for women. By the 17th century, "pussy" was used as a bawdy reference to the female genitalia, and by the 19th had changed to mean an effeminate man. By the beginning of the 20th Century, "pussy" was a slang term for a woman's "happy box" which women found degrading until the feminist movement embraced the word with "I have the pussy so I make the rules" and the now famous "pussy hats".

Most other words commonly used in erotica have also changed meaning over the years, such as cock, dick, prick, tits, etc. The word "fuck" hasn't changed meaning so much as it has changed in usage from a verb (I fuck, you fuck, we all fuck), to a noun (I don't give a fuck), and adjective (she's a fucking bitch), and to an adverb (I fucking nailed her last night), along with an expletive (Oh fuck) and a curse (fuck you and the horse you rode in on).

The result of all this is to translate from one language into another, you not only have to know the context, structure and idioms of both languages, but also the time period in which the words were written.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I question the suggestion that English is 100% compatible with English. At most I'd give it a 9/10.

 

[Britva415]

If it weren’t possible, there wouldn’t be a word for it.

“Translation” is the word for what’s possible. Any claim that “you can’t do it” is disingenuous.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

I question the suggestion that English is 100% compatible with English. At most I'd give it a 9/10.

I certainly need help writing certain characters in American English (and don't get me started on all the authors who think they can write in British English. They can't...)


Given the evolution of US English from a common English in the 16-1700s, in different directions, modern UK English is more like Shakespeare than American, only we're used to understanding American from so much media. Once you know that 'country matters' is a double entendre, and likewise 'nothing' also means cunt, it generally makes sense.

Indian English - that's an alien rhythm and lack of familiar stress patterns, plus a set of divergent vocabulary. Definitely struggling to meet 9/10, but now India has the largest population in the world, it's probably worth some effort to understand in the near future.

All that said, I'm trying to translate a story of mine so I can tick off another Lit category, as well as for the intellectual exercise. A couple kind Literoticans have offered to edit - I'm only subjecting them to 750ish words for now. It does feel remarkably like doing A-levels again - I haven't written multiple formal paragraphs since then!

 

[Cagivagurl]

To me, translation means. Converting the language of one country/ ethnicity into that of another to the best of your ability.
Exact translations are difficult, because in many cases, there is no exact comparrison. The translator has to best match the words into ones, which closest resemble the described...
In that case what you are getting is an opinion. You have drifted from exact to possible...

There is so much possible variation, words meaning different things. The English language is awful for that.

I think it's possible for translated text to lose some of the intent, or passion, or emotion. You have to feel for translators. They are often put in a difficult position.

Cagivagurl

 

[SimonDoom]

I question the suggestion that English is 100% compatible with English. At most I'd give it a 9/10.

I like this. There's a lot of wisdom in accepting that all communication is imperfect. Just look at this forum. We're a bunch of writers who write in English, and presumably we're all pretty good at it, and we misunderstand each other all the time.

I don't know any foreign languages well enough to comment intelligently about translation, but I've read different English translations of some works originally written in other languages, like The Odyssey, and they can be very different from one another, and convey different impressions, moods, and attitudes. Or consider all the different translations in English of the Bible. How do you translate a poetic work? You can't possibly capture the original in the same way. But you can still enjoy it. I try to imagine how French speakers can truly appreciate Shakespeare through translation, but I think they probably can get a lot of it because much of what's good about it isn't tied to the specific words used.

It's always like the game of Telephone. What the speaker says and what the hearer hears are always going to be different, to some degree. We do the best we can. It's part of the fun.

 

[ronde]

I certainly need help writing certain characters in American English (and don't get me started on all the authors who think they can write in British English. They can't...)


Given the evolution of US English from a common English in the 16-1700s, in different directions, modern UK English is more like Shakespeare than American, only we're used to understanding American from so much media. Once you know that 'country matters' is a double entendre, and likewise 'nothing' also means cunt, it generally makes sense.

Indian English - that's an alien rhythm and lack of familiar stress patterns, plus a set of divergent vocabulary. Definitely struggling to meet 9/10, but now India has the largest population in the world, it's probably worth some effort to understand in the near future.

All that said, I'm trying to translate a story of mine so I can tick off another Lit category, as well as for the intellectual exercise. A couple kind Literoticans have offered to edit - I'm only subjecting them to 750ish words for now. It does feel remarkably like doing A-levels again - I haven't written multiple formal paragraphs since then!

I would add that even American English speakers can also have problems writing American English depending upon their age. We seem to be into an age where words become reduced to a few letters (spox, vaca) and entire statements are reduced to acronyms. There's also chat-speak which seems to be finding its way into mainstream communication more and more often. We also seem to have more than one journalist who enjoys making up new words to differentiate themselves.

 

[TheArsonist]

I've read different English translations of some works originally written in other languages, like The Odyssey, and they can be very different from one another, and convey different impressions, moods, and attitudes. Or consider all the different translations in English of the Bible.

A big part of the difficulty of translating Homer or the Bible is not that our language is different, but that our culture is different. There are concepts in those texts that simply don't exist or make sense in the modern world, whether we're speaking English or Greek or Hebrew. In some cases you need to be an expert on the ancient world to understand what they're talking about (or at least an extensive footnote written by an expert), and in other cases the experts can only say that they don't know.

 

[Bramblethorn]

A big part of the difficulty of translating Homer or the Bible is not that our language is different, but that our culture is different. There are concepts in those texts that simply don't exist or make sense in the modern world, whether we're speaking English or Greek or Hebrew. In some cases you need to be an expert on the ancient world to understand what they're talking about (or at least an extensive footnote written by an expert), and in other cases the experts can only say that they don't know.

I'm reminded of this nerd joke:

 

[ronde]

Or consider all the different translations in English of the Bible.

Many if not most of the translations of the Bible were not made using the original ancient Hebrew. They were translations of other translations of some version of Hebrew, and it's probable that each iteration changed things a bit depending upon the beliefs of the translator and/or the era. It's also very important to realize that at least some of the many translations of the Bible were done in a manner to reinforce the beliefs of the person who financed the translation. It's not just the time period of the translation or the understanding of both languages by the translator.

 

[Jackie.Hikaru]

"The original is unfaithful to the translation" - Jorge Luis Borges