Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

pigeonsmasher t1_ja5bayh wrote

Reply to comment by HS_HowCan_That_BeQM in How far off are we from not needing to learn languages? by AmericanMonsterCock

There’s nothing esoteric about learning idioms. Amazon immediately turned up several books worth of German-English idiom translations. I learned dozens of Russian idioms in college and I barely paid attention. Especially considering it’s a language tool, idioms have got to be some of the first things it learned

1

HS_HowCan_That_BeQM t1_ja82sab wrote

When you learned idioms, you probably looked at them from the encountered point of view. Meaning: I'm reading this Russian text and this idiomatic phrase occurs. Oh, that's the equivalent of saying this in my native tongue.

But it is trickier to be looking at an idiomatic native text and intuit: I must replace this with some equivalent when translating this to Russian.

My favorite book about the vagaries and pitfalls of translation is Douglas Hofstadter's "Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language". It covers the difficulties of translating idioms, puns et al. And those don't even cover whether translating a poem means "word-for-word", "rhyme-scheme", "thematically" or some other criterion.

So, maybe idioms are not a difficult test of an AI's competency. But I still feel the fundamentals of natural language will be part of the determination.

Edited: to remove a redundant phrase (idiomatic native idiom).

1