“translating”

One painful thing about translating between two languages is that you usually have to specify a direction. That’s bollocks. Life’s already too complicated to worry about whether you’re translating from English to Spanish or the other way around.

In that spirit I created the str (“Super/Simple/Synchronous TRanslation”) YubNub command. You specify, in any order, 2-letter codes for the two languages you want to translate between and the text you want to translate. str avoids the direction decision by doing both at once, each one presented in an individual vertical frame. This is not only much faster in practice, it’s more unconscious and habit-friendly.

You can try it right here! (en stands for ENglish, es for ESpañol=Spanish)

You can see more instructions and the 2-letter codes at str’s man page.

YubNub, for the uninitiated, is “the (social) command line for the web”—a social webapp to use (and create!) handy commands that search your favorite websites and do a whole nother bunch of wonderful things. The simplest way to use it is from their homepage but there are a ton of ways to install it. Installing it in the location bar, as I once explained here, is in my opinion one of the coolest.

”...begins with a single step,” no? That’s the classic form in English of a Chinese proverb usually attributed to Lao Tzu. It’s wisdom could be said to lie in counteracting our natural inability to grasp incrementalism.

Interestingly, there’s a variant of the proverb I had never heard before—“The journey of a thousand miles begins beneath one’s feet.”—which can lead one to a totally different interpretation: wherever you are, whatever your goal, you have to begin where you stand. The place to start is here, can be nothing but here.

(And for a further remix, “On a journey of a hundred miles, ninety is but half way.”)

Posted in a comment by Thomas Buckner to that famous letter of Eliezer Yudkowsky to his brother Yehuda ^ELZR. No idea about its accuracy. Interestingly, I don’t care one whit.

(Used the Wikipedia trick^ELZR to translate Tuilleries^WP into Spanish—neat!)

Most people don’t even know about it but right at the bottom of the left sidebar of every pedia there’s an in other languages section that turns out to be one of Wikipedia’s pearls.

It is wonderful for translating somewhat obscure nouns that you’d rarely find in a bilingual dictionary, like

• the mathematical concepts of an upper bound (mayorante in Spanish), a set (insiemi in Italian) or a tuple (n-uplet in French);
  


• computer concepts like scrollbar (Bildlauf in German; literally, imagecourse), web browser (navigateur web in French; literally, web navigator), hyperlink (collegamento ipertestuale in Italian), real-time (Echtzeit in German), multimedia (multimedialità in Italian), and operating system (système d’exploitation in French);
  


• relatively unknown Greek gods like Cybele (Cibeles^CB in Spanish) or Priapus (Priape in French);
  


• exotic (anything really)
  
  
  • animals like the civet (Schleichkatzen in German) and the platypus (ornitorinco in Spanish);
    
  
  
  • fruits like the passion fruit (maracujá in Portuguese) and the jackfruit (yaca in Spanish);
    
  
  
  • plants like the okra (gombo in French), the  spearmint (yerbabuena in Spanish; literally, goodgrass), the mandrake (mandragora in Spanish), and the  jimson weed (higuera del infierno in Spanish; literally, infernal fig);
    
  
  
  • flowers like the fuchsia (bellebloem in Nedersaksisch^WP), the medlar (níspero in Spanish), and the saffron (azafrán) in Spanish);
    
  
  


• neologisms like meme meme (mème in French), GM food (alimento transgénico in Spanish), and the long tail (longue traîne in French, sometimes longue queue);
  


• international phrases like to be, or not to be (Sein oder Nichtsein in German) and Land of the Rising Sun (La Tierra del Sol Naciente in Spanish);
  


• digital accoutrements like inkjet printer (Tintenstrahldrucker in German), touchpad (pavé tactile in French), or flatbed scanner (escáner plano in Spanish; literally, flat scanner);
  


• drug paraphernalia/jargon like chillum (chiloom in Italian), syringe driver (Spritzenpumpe in German), rolling machine (interpercolatrice in Italian), bong (pipe à eau in French), and withdrawal syndrome (síndrome de abstinencia in Spanish);
  


• translatable acronyms like NAFTA (TLC in Spanish), NATO (OTAN in French), USSR (CCCP in Russian), or GDP (BIP in German);
  


• or simply peculiar expressions like popular science (divulgación científica in Spanish; literally, scientific divulgation), conspicuous consumption (prangende forbruk in Norwegian), prince charming (príncipe azul in Spanish; literally, blue prince), intellectual property (immaterialrätt in Swedish; literally, immaterial rights), apple of discord (Zankapfel in German), or noble savage (buen salvaje in Spanish; literally, good savage).
  

And it proves a true lifesaver for translating media nouns you would never find in any bilingual dictionary—things like the Smurfs (Pitufos in Spanish), Woody Woodpecker (El Pájaro Loco in Spanish; literally, The Crazy Bird), Pinnocchio (Pinocho in Spanish), There’s Something About Mary (Mary à tout prix in French; literally, Mary at any price), Ghostbusters (Cazafantasmas in Spanish; literally, Ghosthunters), or Baywatch (Alerte à Malibu in French; literally, Alert in Malibu).

I doubt someone would find this too useful but I smiled today when I found about the guess YubNub command. You feed it text, it gulps the language it’s in. A great way to showcase YubNub’s open-ended fun, courtesy of Xerox research. It would have been a godsend when I was dealing with Imagery’s multilingual rush (Oh, how GMail angered me then! Smart enough to correctly spellcheck anything I gave her, yet coyly keeping the language name to herself!). Hope I need it again soon.

For all of you that aren’t on the YubNub wagon yet, you can play with it here—but it won’t be even half as much fun ;).

And since we already seem to be on a language landslide, some months ago I found out playing with Google Translate that when you translate a website from Chinese to English (which is currently beta), you can hover on a sentence to get the original Chinese fragment in a quick popup. Mighty cool. All the more impressive a feature coming from a website. (Now let’s only hope they plan to add it to the other language pairs too…)

Final language tidbit: translate “Hello, how are you?” to Spanish with Google. Your immediate response is “¿Hola, cómo eres?,” sucking the life out of even the hardiest machine-translation enthusiast.

I’m floored too. (And envious!) What Meaningful Machines lyrically calls «flooding» in a recent Wired article, Me Translate Pretty One Day, is a stunningly beautiful translation algorithm, baffling in its simplicity.

Though if it’s simple to state and understand, it’s only because it relies on operations on a terrifying (computational, mathematical) scale. (Like the first time one invokes inside a theorem, say, the set of all possible sets, there’s a mixture of fright and awe—we can barely believe our moxie to write such thoughts.) In a very real way, the algorithm is written in Moore’s law language and if it escaped us all it’s mostly because our words are so shy, so inadvertently constrained by past assumptions.

Ah! How exciting! Machine language translation is on the horizon.

Just good fun writing. On the singularity to boot. To be read with that eemadge from Moravec I always quote in such settings.

Heh, that “first, then, now” schtick never grows old. Here’s another instance of it.

That last paragraph of the quote was included simply for Chepe & Andrea, the two wonderful translators-to-be in my life, to read and grok. It’s not that I don’t support such a lovely liberal-arts profession (I’ve surely considered it for myself in several occasions). I simply believe it’s going to be among the next professions to be submerged^EE by AI, and seafaring success thereon will require a different skillset and attitude.

Here’s an excellent formist intro to international auxiliary languages^WP written by Eward Sapir^WP himself (one of the most influential American linguists of the past century) in 1925:

There are many, many highlights to be made. Here’s four

1. The “difficult and subjective concept” of the richness of a language, the “richness of connotations” (that phrase alone was worth the price of admission). This was precisely what I was getting at in my badly-received post On the Language of this Blog.
2. “It is true that English is not as complex in its formal structure as is German or Latin, but this does not dispose of the matter. The fact that a beginner in English has not many paradigms to learn gives him a feeling of absence of difficulty, but he soon learns to his cost that this is only a feeling, that in sober fact the very absence of explicit guide-posts to structure leads him into all sorts of quandaries.. The simplicity of English in its formal aspect is.. really a pseudo-simplicity or a masked complexity.”
3. His dazzling insight that the problem of finding an adequate international auxiliary language is really the problem of how best to “symbolize thought.” Wow. Just wow.
4. ”A common allegiance to a form of expression that is identified with no single national unit is likely to prove one of the most potent symbols of the freedom of the human spirit that the world has yet known.” ‘Nuff said.

* * *

Y’know, just between you and me, when the time is ripe—that is, in around 10 years—I would love to plunge myself in language: I would love to speak (and think in) Esperanto, Japanese, German, French, Mandarin, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, Russian, Hebrew, Sweddish, Arab, Hindi… —Oh! Were languages not the harsh mistresses that they are! I’d love to work (and solve!) the problem of automatic machine translation (which, according to Kurzweil, will be the last task left for AI to emulate, the crucial last stepping stone to consciousness). I’d love to read both Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. I’d love to construct all sorts of constructed and auxiliary languages. I’d love to write in Esperanto and join la movado. I’d love to become a Wiktionary super-freak. I’d love to write language textbooks. I’d love to create a compiler and write programming languages. I’d love (in a most masochistic kind of way) to be a professional translator and translate a novel. I’d love to study some serious linguistics. I’d love to do advanced algebra. I’d love to become a Lisp super-freak or, quite oppositely, think in assembly code. I’d love to understand Goedel’s incompleteness theorem. I’d love to work in the semantic web. I’d love to create software to help one read and absorb written information (we have software to write, word processors, so why don’t we have software to read?).

Oh well, please excuse the future lapse.

“Si lo nuestro va a funcionar…”

Translate that!

Si, probablemente “If our relationship is gonna work out…” sea una traduccion satisfactoria pero lo que yo busco es una traduccion en la que “relationship” vaya implicita, no solo por cobarde sino porque siento que “lo nuestro” habla de algo mas intimo, mas sutil.

How would you say “unos novios comiendose a besos” in English? What’s the English phrase for “comiendose a besos”? Do you realize there’s no ready equivalent of “novios” in English? There’s “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” but no “novios” (a word for a gf and her bf). Couple is probably the best ersatz but there are subtle differences. “Couple” hints of a more formal, older-people affair than “novios.” It’d feel strange to call two tweens in love a couple, but it’d be perfectly normal to call them “novios.” If I were to announce that “Bere y yo ya somos novios” I wouldn’t use the stiff and over-formal “Bere and me are now a couple”, I’d say “Bere and me are now officially a couple.” Now, in what dictionary do you find that officially is often used to de-emphasize formality?