FWIW I recently was watching something that i did not realise had been auto translated from Chinese to English. It was kind of a technical topic, but still it seemed perfectly natural. It struck me that .. as much as conflict hawks and clash of culture theorists might want to do their best to construct an enemy, if we get past the disorientation of language barriers, then mostly people are the same. If AI translation can help with that its a benefit.
The Standard Chinese language was always known to be oddly syntactically close to US English. No one calls it an Indo-European language, but they sometimes feel closer together than English and French on surface levels. Japanese is not like that - even human translations between anything to/from Japanese sound translated.
Japanese can especially be tricky to machine-translate because often the subject is missing from a sentence, where it would be required in an equivalent English sentence. The machine translation tends to insert its best guess of a subject (usually "I" or "you"), which can often flip a sentence's meaning inside-out.
I'm thinking there's something deeper or wider than even that. Apparently there's something in Windows 11 right now that says "3 minutes 21 number 2", down to inclusion of the number, because, you know, seconds.
I have my own essay on this matter to post on the Internet, but, to say the least, I don't think this mode of failures happen nearly as often in most other languages, if ever.
There used to be a website called "Translation Party" where you would input a sentence in English and it would auto-translate it to Japanese and back to English over and over until it got to some equilibrium (where the translations were effectively the same) or hit it's upper bound of like 20 ish swings back and forth.
It was a fun little tool, but I think that really drove home for me how different Japanese is from English in how it structures itself.
Yeah, I occasionally tell my Chinese friends that the grammar of English and Chinese is actually pretty similar. If they respond with surprise, I'd say, "Have you ever tried to learn Turkish?" Chinese doesn't have conjugation; but the basic sentence structure (subject-verb-object, preposition, etc) are similar. There are of course loads of differences; but nothing nearly so deeply structural as Turkish, where you indicate relationships between things by adding suffixes; or Japanese, which just has a completely different way of bringing up topics.
Culture is just as much a part of language as the language itself.
There is an air of arrogance in proclaiming that it is merely language barriers that are an issue. But of course it's a convenient argument for big tech forcing MTL on all of us.
But it ultimately marginalizes smaller communities and kills languages. Cultural genocide if you will.
The dangerous thing is that the current state of MTL is serviceable and even usable, but a bilingual speaker will immediately know something is off.
I have noticed this both for French and German, two languages with lots of training material. I imagine it's much much worse for smaller languages and/or communities.
As more and more content on the web is automatically translated, we will all start to talk like translated-from-English LLMs, and that is a future I'm not looking forward to.
