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When is a translation considered a machine translation?


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34 minutes ago, 1P1A said:

Translating and learning Japanese only overlap on a small level,

Are you making a distinction between translating and reading? To some degree reading a second language is translating, but I'm not sure if you mean like translating for people who don't speak Japanese at all.

46 minutes ago, tymmur said:

To answer the question: human beats machine in sentences with simple grammar while machine has the edge if the sentence use more advanced grammar.

 Interesting. If you think about it, more complicated/advanced also means more precise. I wouldn't have guessed that machines would win out in "advanced" sentences because I tend to think of translator machines as dumb since they can't get the easy stuff right, but really it kinda makes sense that they get better when you provided them with more precise grammar, even if it's hard for a human learner to make sense of that same grammar.

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5 minutes ago, tahu157 said:

Are you making a distinction between translating and reading?

I'm just saying that turning Japanese into English takes a lot of time, and time spent focusing on the language is better than trying to think of how to convey one language in the other.

The actual reading portion is going to help a lot, and time is better spent doing that supplemented with general studying.

9 minutes ago, tahu157 said:

To some degree reading a second language is translating, but I'm not sure if you mean like translating for people who don't speak Japanese at all.

This really confuses me. Reading = translating?

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2 minutes ago, 1P1A said:

This really confuses me. Reading = translating?

It seems like making sense of a foreign language in your own native language is inescapable, at least to start off with. Eventually you can get to the point where you just understand a second language in that language, but to start off with I'd say reading involves a whole lot of translating.

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16 minutes ago, tahu157 said:

It seems like making sense of a foreign language in your own native language is inescapable, at least to start off with.

I mentioned something like this in my first post.

Quote

Jisho only gives English approximations meant for beginner/intermediates to give them a foothold on the language.

 

16 minutes ago, tahu157 said:

Eventually you can get to the point where you just understand a second language in that language, but to start off with I'd say reading involves a whole lot of translating.

From Wikipedia: Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text.

I don't think translation is quite what you're thinking unless I missed something.

 

Edit: I think you're confusing interpretation and translation.

Edited by 1P1A
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6 minutes ago, tahu157 said:

 Interesting. If you think about it, more complicated/advanced also means more precise. I wouldn't have guessed that machines would win out in "advanced" sentences because I tend to think of translator machines as dumb since they can't get the easy stuff right, but really it kinda makes sense that they get better when you provided them with more precise grammar, even if it's hard for a human learner to make sense of that same grammar.

I don't think it has to do with precision, but rather humans benefit from context awareness. If a human can get the meaning, the result will always be better than a machine translation. However without having studied grammar, there is a limit to how complex sentences, which can be understood and if you go over the limit, the meaning is lost. The same is true for MT, but since they do know some grammar (particularly Atlas, which actually tries to analyze the grammar), the bar is higher. This leaves a span of grammar complexity where the human fails, but MT don't fail completely. This is not proof that MT handles complex grammar better than simple grammar.

Analyzing this completely is however a bit pointless. You can study grammar and become good enough to always beat MT, but you would most likely still not be considered good enough to join a translation project. Well it might depend on the project.

18 minutes ago, tahu157 said:

o some degree reading a second language is translating, but I'm not sure if you mean like translating for people who don't speak Japanese at all.

4 minutes ago, 1P1A said:

This really confuses me. Reading = translating?

This puzzles me as well. I wonder if this is @tahu157 admitting to being a native English speaker and not skilled in foreign languages. There is a huge difference between reading and translating, even if you are unskilled and need to look up each word. The key difference between reading and translating is word order. In a translation you change the word ordering, add/remove words and in some cases just replace words because it would feel more natural to say it in a different way in English. I can't remember ever making a translation while reading unless the translation was a goal in itself. Translating can be a lot harder than just fully understanding something.

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3 hours ago, tymmur said:

I wonder if this is @tahu157 admitting to being a native English speaker and not skilled in foreign languages.

 

3 hours ago, tymmur said:

This puzzles me as well.

 

4 hours ago, 1P1A said:

I don't think translation is quite what you're thinking unless I missed something.

How would you guys describe the process of a language learner reading something in a non-native language? To me reading a foreign language at a sub-fluent level means ingesting that language and transforming it into English (or whatever your native language is). The understanding of the text that I achieve comes from the English generated in my head and not from source language. To me that sounds a lot like translating, albeit internally, on the fly, and with no editing. Obviously the end goal is to be a fluent reader who could/should be able to cut that internal translation step out of the process and just simply understand what they're reading by looking at it. Until you get to the point though, I'd say you're doing at least a little translating in your head.

 

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7 hours ago, tymmur said:

you read about a new concept, you can go "ohh, I saw something like this already. It was that odd thing the heroine said that I didn't fully get. Now I get it".

I had similar experience while reading translated VNs, just the other way around. It is nice feeling when I am able to pick up more and more from spoken lines - and there are moments where heroine says something and I'm like "Ah! That's the thing I just learned about - now I get it".

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8 hours ago, tahu157 said:

How would you guys describe the process of a language learner reading something in a non-native language? To me reading a foreign language at a sub-fluent level means ingesting that language and transforming it into English (or whatever your native language is). The understanding of the text that I achieve comes from the English generated in my head and not from source language. To me that sounds a lot like translating, albeit internally, on the fly, and with no editing. Obviously the end goal is to be a fluent reader who could/should be able to cut that internal translation step out of the process and just simply understand what they're reading by looking at it. Until you get to the point though, I'd say you're doing at least a little translating in your head.

I think it comes down to debating how to define the word translate. I think you argue towards something like an analogue translation (word by word without considering word order). Despite its name, it's generally not considered a translation. Sure people will think of some sort of translation or equitant for each word in a language more familiar to them when they study a new language, meaning they will end up with some sort of poor translation or summary. I'm not sure what to call this, but I don't think it is correct to call it translating.

Personally I try to vision the meaning without thinking of specific words to translate to. If there is a word, which is 100% the same, then that word could show up in my head as a translated word. However often words can't be translated on a 1:1 basis and then I think of the concept rather than individual words. In fact it's quite rare that I think of something you could consider a translation. However I don't think I'm a good example of what people tend to do. Way back when I had to learn foreign languages at school, I was partially homeschooled because there is no way I could be allowed to be bad at my mother's field of expertise. As a result I will dare to say I haven't learned much from school teachers, only people with university backgrounds. The result speaks for itself. Technically speaking, I'm using my third foreign language right now.

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3 hours ago, tymmur said:

I'm not sure what to call this, but I don't think it is correct to call it translating.

Would you say it's more accurate to say that I am describing the meaning of the foreign text to myself in English then, as opposed to "translating?" 

Edited by tahu157
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15 minutes ago, tahu157 said:

Would you say it's more accurate to say that I am describing the meaning of the foreign text to myself in English then, as opposed to "translating?" 

Most likely. When translating you have to come up with a full sentence with a description, which covers everything. When you "translate in your head for yourself", you do not need to form a full sentence and you don't have to have one sentence with the entire meaning, or even finding words for everything. Something, which can be very hard to translate is colors. You can be fully aware of precisely how a color looks like, but clueless to how to give a proper description of that color in your native language because often colors don't match 1:1 between languages. Take for instance the English sentence "I'm stuck in traffic waiting for green light". Translate that to Japanese and back and suddenly you are waiting for blue light (at least in MT) because the Japanese color 青 (ao) is somewhat of a mix and can be translated as either blue or green. In this case green is the obvious translation, but there are plenty of cases where it's not clear how to translate a color, but if you are doing it in your head, you don't need a word. You can imagine the vision of the color even if you don't know how to explain it in your native language.

Because of this, it would be more accurate to say you are describing or explaining the sentence context to yourself than to say you are translating it in your head. Translating is to make the description so detailed that it can be understood by somebody who only knows one language.

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On 5/6/2018 at 9:59 PM, phantomJS said:

Personal gut feeling is those who are weak in Jap will not come and work on a TL for free as TL-ing requires passion, commitment, and confidence to do so.

What do passion, commitment, or confidence have anything to do with the quality of one's Japanese skills?

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2 minutes ago, Nandemonai said:

What do passion, commitment, or confidence have anything to do with the quality of one's Japanese skills?

Having great Japanese literacy skills will give rises to your confidence at a Translator, and that it turn should make you passionate and be willing to commit to a TL project. It is pretty difficult to envision someone who is weak in Japanese to be confident and passionate enough to commit to a TL project unless someone hires him to do so, at least in my opinion.

I would admit I didn't express my feelings clearly. I also have no idea on how to do so :(

Hope you understood what I'm trying to convey :P

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Just now, phantomJS said:

Having great Japanese literacy skills will give rises to your confidence at a Translator, and that it turn should make you passionate and be willing to commit to a TL project. It is pretty difficult to envision someone who is weak in Japanese to be confident and passionate enough to commit to a TL project unless someone hires him to do so, at least in my opinion.

Being good at Japanese doesn't make you a good translator.  It's not enough.  You also need to be good at English.  And you have to care.  Plenty of people are good at Japanese and aren't passionate about translating anything at all, much less a VN.

But aside from that, we already know that most of the fan translators who are actually pretty good end up going pro.  Why would you do something for free when you're good enough to get paid to do it?  And we also know there are plenty of really bad fan translators out there.  We've seen their work.  Wanting to translate a game doesn't make you any good at it.

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12 minutes ago, Nandemonai said:

Being good at Japanese doesn't make you a good translator.  It's not enough.  You also need to be good at English.  And you have to care.  Plenty of people are good at Japanese and aren't passionate about translating anything at all, much less a VN.

 

12 minutes ago, Nandemonai said:

 And we also know there are plenty of really bad fan translators out there.  We've seen their work.  Wanting to translate a game doesn't make you any good at it.

People good at Japanese doesn't necessarily make good translators, but people with weak Japanese literacy will certainly not qualify, and will not TL unless they are working for money.

Good translators are confident, passionate, and willing to commit, but only if they are fluent in Japanese in the first place. Assuming all of these are at least somewhat factual, that means I think most of the TL-ers in the Fan-TL group are mostly good translators relatively speaking. That's the point I'm trying to make.

12 minutes ago, Nandemonai said:

But aside from that, we already know that most of the fan translators who are actually pretty good end up going pro.  Why would you do something for free when you're good enough to get paid to do it?

Maybe you and I won't but that doesn't make it an absolute fact and it's just a subjective opinion unless you can proof every good fan translator went pro :P

Edited by phantomJS
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