SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
[...] When I first got interested in the subject, in the mid-1970s, I ran across a letter written in 1947 by the mathematician Warren Weaver, an early machine-translation advocate, to Norbert Wiener, a key figure in cybernetics, in which Weaver made this curious claim, today quite famous:
When I look at an article in Russian, I say, "This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode."
[...] The practical utility of Google Translate and similar technologies is undeniable, and probably it's a good thing overall, but there is still something deeply lacking in the approach, which is conveyed by a single word: understanding. Machine translation has never focused on understanding language. Instead, the field has always tried to "decode"—to get away without worrying about what understanding and meaning are. Could it in fact be that understanding isn't needed in order to translate well? Could an entity, human or machine, do high-quality translation without paying attention to what language is all about? To shed some light on this question, I turn now to the experiments I made.
It is a bit on the long side but Douglas Hofstadter very clearly exposes what language translation is and that Google Translate does not do it that way
Source: The Shallowness of Google Translate
(Score: 3, Interesting) by vux984 on Friday February 02 2018, @11:54PM (3 children)
Lets say I want you to water a plant and I mime pouring water out of a glass; if you misunderstand that to mean I want you empty a glass, and you pour some water into a plant because the the only glass in the test room had room temperature water in it, and the only reasonable place to get rid of the water was to either drink it or pour into the plant so you chose the plant... that's "success" in a study like that which is definitely interesting.
But its not really a success of communication, or of understanding.
For what its worth, this is one reason why outsourced software development is so lousy so often. If the people doing the development don't actually understand the context, and the problem being solved -- they simply make the wrong decisions and wrong assumptions. And even if the result meets the 'specs' it just 'wrong' in blatantly obvious ways for anyone actually using it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 03 2018, @12:05AM (1 child)
The curious thing was that such misunderstanding was so common in "successful" communication sessions.
In the end, you have to ask what the point of communication is. Is it for particular goal/actions to be realized, or is it for some kinda of abstract "understanding"?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 03 2018, @01:16PM
Understanding is not required, only obedience.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 03 2018, @01:51PM
All that example shows is that you were operating in such a constrained environment there essentially was no way to do something wrong.
That's like saying "look how good that dog obeys, he walks right next to me". While you're dragging it alongside you on its leash... Utterly absurd.
Hey, all those prisoners, look how obedient they are, they all stay in prison! It must be because they have such great communication with the warden!