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English is currently one of the dominant languages on the planet due to the spread of the US and UK empires in the last century. With the rise of technology English may be made redundant with the advent of automatic language translation.
Just waiting for made up languages to become the norm (e.g. Esperanto), or hyper language learning.
Now ponder, as Douglas Hofstadter did, translating Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky from English into French, German, and Russian (Cyrillic .GIF) or (ASCII transliteration).
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English is King but Technology May Trump All
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TAPPING? You POLITICIANS! Don't you realize that the END of the "Wash
Cycle" is a TREASURED MOMENT for most people?!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RamiK on Sunday January 27 2019, @11:34PM (1 child)
Yes and no. While you're right about English having a huge vocabulary. you're wrong about what it mean. In practice, it creates a language you can translate-to with a fair bit of accuracy, but typically can't translate-from properly since the target language lacks certain distinctions. Chinese has a similar "feature" where the written letters carry a lot of complicated connotations since they express different words so that can only be understood by literate Chinese readers or much of the subtext will be lost so you're forced to learned it literally "to the letter" in order to use it properly.
It's why computing is dominated by C++: A good language is well defined and easy to port in and out of. So, over time, the market slowly fills up with C++ since all it takes is one horrible decision to convert to an awful language like C++ which can't typically be undone realistically.
Effectively it's Peter principle being applied to human and computing languages.
If I couldn't convince an American native English speaking professor of literature Clean & Jerk wasn't slang for masturbation but a weightlifting maneuver without having to provide a footnote from a Kinesiology textbook, I doubt machine translation will ever become possible.
compiling...
(Score: 4, Funny) by maxwell demon on Monday January 28 2019, @12:11AM
Machine translation definitely is possible. I just translated my computer, clearly a machine, from one place to another. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.