To Ear, From Mouth
Pat Gunn here again.
Many of you have used DEC’s Babelfish software or one of the more modern tools in that genre. A semi-recent common amusement is to translate a text across several languages and then back to the original, as a variant of the old party game, telephone. Cumulative errors typically produce amusing results. This demonstrates two things, firstly that people have the ability to come up with games out of almost any situation, and secondly that language translation is difficult. Languages act as borders for thought — the constructs we build in thinking are composed of concepts that are usually made familiar by frequent usage in our mother tongue. Similarly, because we don’t have the ability to richly remember things indefinitely, any constructs that do depend on things we don’t have good words for are easily lost or distorted as we simplify them to a set of phrases or jot them down. The words d
August 29th, 2006 at 6:22 pm
You, Me, Gerard Meijssen, Sabine Cretella, and TAW are going to have to have a deathmatch over this one.
WiktionaryZ has a specific concept called a Defined Meaning, which sidesteps several of these issues.
Hmm, maybe we could make a blog post about that?