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Learning foreign languages: Will it become obsolete | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| 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 17 of 42 13 May 2013 at 9:46pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I thought it was obviously tongue-in-cheek ;) Edited by Serpent on 13 May 2013 at 9:49pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6440 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 18 of 42 13 May 2013 at 10:15pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
While Juan's philosophical point fundamentally misunderstands the limits of computation, he's absolutely correct that language learning is unlikely to be obsolete before your retirement. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5346 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 19 of 42 13 May 2013 at 11:19pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Far be it from me to challenge your understanding of computers, but when it comes to human reason I stand by my statement, it being of a nature utterly distinct from that of the algorithms that make up a computer program. Whereas the latter consists of a finite set of rules, human reason is unbounded, open ended, indefinable, and most crucially, no matter how hard we try, not capable of being explicitly reconciled with itself. This is the quintessential human quality, giving rise to liberty, the dearest of our values.
Science isn't subject to the fundamentally divergent viewpoints that enrich other forms of human expression. By its nature it seeks definiteness, and for this multiple languages are indeed a redundancy; we don't regularly employ separate methods of representing mathematics either. Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I imagine not many calculus textbooks today in Japan make use of 一 二 三 四 五 六 七 八 く and 十 either in place of Arabic numerals. In my view, learning languages powerfully benefits those higher faculties of the human spirit that take form in culture, philosophy, literature - those endeavors that seek meaning rather than an accumulation of facts. Reading a modern astronomy publication in Russian, Japanese or Tamil won't provide you a fundamentally different perspective, whereas the native literature and philosophical speculations of each culture does. These however are also being threatened by the leveling influence of technology, democracy, English, and the modern, American way of life, with invaluable and irreplaceable forms of expression becoming extinct or at least being dramatically degraded thereby. The Colombian philosopher Nicolás Gómez Dávila, who didn't trust translations and maintained what was probably the largest polyglot personal library in Latin America, regarded with contempt any idea that wasn't at least a thousand years old. We can shorten that time frame by a factor of ten and gain certainty of not incurring an exaggeration. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6440 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 20 of 42 13 May 2013 at 11:46pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Human brains are very finite, no matter how one looks at them: we have finite numbers of neurons, of connections between neurons, etc. Computers, on the other hand, are not quite so definite as one might think. Fundamental mathematical results (see Turing's work on the halting problem, and Gödel's work on incompleteness) show that you can't prove that arbitrary computer programs will even ever stop running, and that consistent formal systems have true statements that can't be proven. And nothing stops someone from implementing an inconsistent system on top of computer hardware when it's useful to. Neither computers nor human brains are entirely unbounded - or entirely limited to consistent logic and deterministic algorithms.
Intellectual traditions vary from one research group to the next, and also between languages. In realms as abstract as much as mathematics, this can be rather more important than you might assume; some mathematicians go so far as to call mathematics in their native language a precious cultural asset for the world.
The differences in languages certainly matter yet more in cultural pursuits, from literature to philosophy. However, a reading knowledge of several languages certainly can additionally provide an enriched sense of the history of science. I would hate to throw away everything that's been learned in the last hundred years. However, whether ones' aim is contemporary business or science, or classical literature, I don't foresee advances in computing that will make language learning obsolete within the next few decades. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 21 of 42 14 May 2013 at 12:52am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
It's hard to explain Volte's point without covering a semester or two of mathematics. (And mathematics, like a foreign language, takes time and hard work to fully internalize.) But to summarize things in nutshell: The laws of physics, as we understand them, are almost certainly computable[1]. This leaves a philosopher with two choices: either (a) human language skills ultimately arise from the laws of physics, in which case the differences between the linguistic abilities of humans and computers are largely a matter of style and scale, or (b) human language skills have some sort of supernatural origin outside the laws of physics, in which case any further discussion is in the domain of theologians (and probably off-topic on HTLAL). There are a few possible hypotheses which might offer a choice (c), including super-Turing computation and Penrose's suggestions of some mysterious quantum phenomenon unrelated to quantum physics as we know it. But all known candidates for a choice (c) have a certain odor of crankery hanging about them. One thing to keep in mind is that—at the absolute minimum—the human brain is an enormously powerful computational device. If you wanted to fake human capabilities, you would first need really staggering amounts of computing power. The lowest plausible estimate of what it would take to imitate the human brain is about 10 to the 14th operations per second, which was proposed by Hans Moravec based on comparisons between the human retina and various existing computer vision systems. This is equivalent to roughly 100,000 processors running at 1GHz. And remember, this is the lowest estimate. Many other estimates are 1,000,000,000 times higher, and that's ignoring the effects of glial cells on whatever the brain is doing. Of course, this leaves the question about what to do with all the processing power. We barely even know where to start. (Although Google Translate provides some evidence that we understand a little bit about one minuscule corner of the problem. It's not like the bad old days of the 80s where we understood nothing at all.) So realistically, even if human intelligence is based entirely on the laws of physics, and thus theoretically computable, that doesn't necessarily mean we're going to see smart computers any time soon. So what does this mean for translators? Well, go pick on article off the front page of Le Monde and ask Google to translate it into English. This is pretty much the absolute best case for Google Translate: Two closely-related languages with an enormous corpus of parallel texts, most of which concern government, politics or the news. And Google Translate will occasionally do a really good job with Le Monde articles. But there are still tons of little mistakes everywhere, and a total lack of common sense. This is because Google Translate is not a human being, and only human beings have the knowledge and judgement required to make a high quality translation. Or to put it in a nutshell: If you want to have a future as a translator, don't plan to work for clients who want crappy, cheap translations in bulk. Plan to work for clients who need high-quality translations that involve human judgement and good writing, and your future will be secure—because nothing dumber than a human can do that work acceptably well. Also consider the possibility that the most successful translators in the future may use a hybrid of human judgement and low-level machine translation to produce good output quickly. [1]Quantum physics suggests that the laws of the universe are not efficiently computable on classical computers. This inefficiency could be partly overcome by building quantum computers. Edited by emk on 14 May 2013 at 2:27am 8 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4669 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 22 of 42 14 May 2013 at 10:57am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Learn Mandarin or Japanese, so you can be an interpreter. The market is flooded with interpreters translating between ''easy'' languages. (There are already too many interpreters and translators for these languages, so the money is nothing to write home about). Russian, Hindi/Urdu, Arabic, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, these are the languages one should chose, if $$$$$$$$ is the goal. Most people here learn languages as a hobby, so it does not affect us much. We can choose languages we like, instead of the most sought ones (''sought'' as in: interpreters desperately wanted, and big money offered). An English speaking person can make big bucks if he/she masters Japanese, and specializes himself/herself in business Japanese. But, mastering ''business Japanese'' is not an easy task. Edited by Medulin on 14 May 2013 at 11:07am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4829 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 23 of 42 14 May 2013 at 12:49pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
One might think this would include literary translations. However, I happened to meet the translator (into English) of one book by a classic author, and asked him if he perhaps had plans to translate another work that I would have liked to see a good translation of. He said that he might like to do it, but the difficulty was finding a publisher to take it. As it was, there was one work by this author which he'd dearly love to translate, but so far, he'd not found any publisher interest. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Steffen Newbie Germany Joined 4972 days ago 27 posts - 63 votes Studies: German* | Message 24 of 42 14 May 2013 at 4:02pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Being German, I am, of course, partial. So I tried to soothe me hurt feelings and verify my scepticism by searching the internet. According to several websites, German is ranking at number 10 of the most common languages in the world. There are only 3-4 times as many native speakers of English than there are native speakers of German (there are obviously many more second language learners of English). German also appears to be the most widespread language in Europe. Ah, solace! Edited by Steffen on 14 May 2013 at 4:07pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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