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Learning foreign languages: Will it become obsolete | ||
Tags: Foreign Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5925 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 9 of 42 13 May 2013 at 10:37am | IP Logged | |||||
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I have already written about Google Translate here but didn't give any examples to support my opinion of Google Translate. I will give one example now.
Earlier this evening I decided to test Google Translate's ability to translate a simple English sentence into Afrikaans. If you click on the link I have provided you will see that the English sentence is "I have bought a new house." which, according to GT, becomes "Ek het gekoop 'n nuwe huis." in Afrikaans. This translation is grammatically incorrect. If the Afrikaans sentence had been correctly translated it would be "Ek het 'n nuwe huis gekoop.". I know that this is a simple sentence and maybe I could say "Ek het gekoop 'n nuwe huis." to an Afrikaans speaker and be understood but I don't know this for certain and saying this would definitely show that I don't understand Afrikaans grammar at all. Furthermore, if I can't trust GT to translate a very basic sentence correctly, How could I trust it to handle more complex thoughts or phrases? Afrikaans is quite close to English, has virtually no verb conjugation and very few inflections, but GT still gets it wrong. It does far worse with languages like Finnish which has few similarities with English, many compound words and elaborate inflections. If you do not mind quick and sloppy translations, then GT is a useful, albeit mediocre, supplemental tool for language learning, if you also use other more reliable sources of information. I would never use this for translating anything where more accurate or precise communication would be required, such as legal documents or business negotiations. Edited by mick33 on 13 May 2013 at 8:47pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 10 of 42 13 May 2013 at 2:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
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A direct answer: no, the software will never be good enough, but no, don't get a degree (solely) in languages.
Let me guess a bit: is Spanish one of those languages you speak a little? And you have no motivation to improve beyond the level which hardly impresses anyone in Portugal? Spanish, French and English will always remain useful in your country, I think. The two possibilities here are that you don't like the language and/or the learning process. If it's the former, learn a language you want to learn, even if it's not as useful as Spanish. If it's the latter... related languages should be learned differently from how they traditionally teach languages! The main difficulty here is not "confusing the languages" but just boredom! But making it enjoyable is very easy and it's my favourite kind of language learning! As you can see, I'm not a native Portuguese speaker, but I speak it better than I speak Spanish, because I like it more ;P and I've thoroughly enjoyed learning Spanish so far :))) Tell me if I'm right and I'll list my favourite resources :P also a routine question to anyone from your country (and some others): do you like football? :) I love it a lot (I support Benfica) and I've found it very useful for my learning :))) 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 11 of 42 13 May 2013 at 2:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Translation may become superfluous for a simple reason: English will kill off all scientific writing in the West, and mandarin will take over the East. And if there are 100 persons with another maternal language in a room and one Anglophone monoglot enters the room then a majority of globally minded and politically correct persons in the room will feel compelled to speak English in order not to offend the lone monoglot intruder. Or rather, they will get starry eyes and start babbling in broken English to prove their skills.
In such a world you wouldn't have much use for other languages than your own for use with family and friends (until that language dies out) plus English for communication with everybody else .. unless of course your maternal language already is English. That would be a very sad and very boring world from the point of view of a language aficionado. But luckily you can also learn languages just for fun, even though the more utilitaristically and globally minded native speakers of your target languages can't understand why you bother about learning their language. So far the situation is not so extreme as I described, but I remember for instance in Kuching and Kuala Lumpur how difficult it was to find something about science or history in Bahasa Malaysia even in large bookstores. And in my own country the more ambitious and business minded authors of scientific articles already write them in English. So the it is not totally out of the question that everything of interest about science, history and things like that already would be written in English. So why learn German, Greek, Esperanto or Vietnamese if everybody who speaks these languages prefer to speak in English with you? Again, the only answer is that you might WANT to learn those languages, and that you do it in spite of the opinion of people who couldn't care less about languages and language learning. After all, people don't stop playing football just because I find it utterly pointless. And what about technology? I already use the internet as my prime source of study objects, and if it wasn't for places like HTLAL I would hardly have any readers for something I might fancy to write in small and vulnerable languages like German. Likewise, the translatation machines will not take over the serious part of the translation business soon (for obvious reasons), but you may find machine translations turning up at the most unexpected places, like on the outside of your toothpaste packaging or in the user's manual for your next computer. And it will not be hard to spot them. But that's not heir most profitable use: I have written many times that they can be useful even at the current level if used in the opposite direction, i.e. from your target language to your native one. And the idea is not that Google translate or its collegues will deliver you a complete and trustworthy translation - because they won't - but they can give you just enough information to make an otherwise impenetrable text comprehensible. Which isn't bad at all. Edited by Iversen on 13 May 2013 at 3:01pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4623 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 12 of 42 13 May 2013 at 2:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Online translators actually encourage me to learn languages because I can use them to help me out with simple words and phrases. Yes, a native speaker is the best source of information but they aren't always available.
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| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4708 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 13 of 42 13 May 2013 at 2:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I think Iversen has it. I, as a scientist, am forced to write pretty much anything in
English, and even at MSc levels classes are by definition in English. English is simply what you write, and I find this quite disheartening. It won't directly threaten French or German, but there is a dearth of materials concerning lesser-studied languages that don't have such interesting content, such as Icelandic or Swedish, which are slowly converting that part of their output to English, which is a shame. I still think it should be mandatory to have MSc/graduate papers in the local language, also for scientists. It allows for more freedom of expression and doesn't force us to all speak and write bad English. One standard is not good if it is substandard. 8 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4623 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 14 of 42 13 May 2013 at 8:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
Oh come on! German can hardly be classed as small and especially not as vulnerable. It has 100 million native speakers and is the language of the most powerful economy in Europe. It is widely studied as a foreign language and is used to conduct some international business. Huge numbers of books are published in German and all films and TV shows from abroad are dubbed. When you cross the border from your homeland into Schlesswig-Holstein, are the locals desperate to speak English with you? I think not. 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5925 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 15 of 42 13 May 2013 at 9:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
Edited by mick33 on 13 May 2013 at 9:40pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5346 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 16 of 42 13 May 2013 at 9:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
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No, for the simple reason that the human mind is not a computation machine; in principle, you can not define or reduce it to a set of rules or algorithms, which is what a computer is. Thus a computer can not replicate language, this being the product of an entirely different nature.
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