Comment Not possible (Score 1) 227
First there are even significant differences between similar languages like englishromance languages cause there to be no direct translation between the two.
Consider for example, that many European languages have two forms of the word "they" to distinguish among males and females. Sometimes in english we use "they" to mean a single person whose gender is unspecified.
Nouns don't have exactly the same meaning, for example /.ers will refer to their machine as a "terminal" which could also be interpreted as the location of their gate in an airport. They might not require a subject in all their sentences, so to translate to English you have to figure out from the context who's doing the action.
What is proposed is to translate to languages much less related to ones in common usage. Even parts of speech don't correspond. Some concepts that we think of as verbs could be adjectives in other languages (Think "I drive my car" compared to "I am , and I'm in my car" type of thing. Many native american languages are highly morphological. That is: concepts that we express in several words can be rolled into one in these languages.
By the way, all of the above assumes that your input is perfectly grammatically correct (whatever that means) Introduce human error, and the result is hard enough for a human, let alone any kind of machine.
I started taking linguistics courses to increase my comprehension of language (I'm monolingual and always had trouble with foreign languages). The main thing I learned is how incredibly complex language is, so massive that you can't comprehend all the inherent rules, yet our brain somehow knows how to process it.
Consider for example, that many European languages have two forms of the word "they" to distinguish among males and females. Sometimes in english we use "they" to mean a single person whose gender is unspecified.
Nouns don't have exactly the same meaning, for example
What is proposed is to translate to languages much less related to ones in common usage. Even parts of speech don't correspond. Some concepts that we think of as verbs could be adjectives in other languages (Think "I drive my car" compared to "I am , and I'm in my car" type of thing. Many native american languages are highly morphological. That is: concepts that we express in several words can be rolled into one in these languages.
By the way, all of the above assumes that your input is perfectly grammatically correct (whatever that means) Introduce human error, and the result is hard enough for a human, let alone any kind of machine.
I started taking linguistics courses to increase my comprehension of language (I'm monolingual and always had trouble with foreign languages). The main thing I learned is how incredibly complex language is, so massive that you can't comprehend all the inherent rules, yet our brain somehow knows how to process it.
