why do computer-based translators have so much trouble going between Chinese and English? Can’t someone have come up with an efficient algorithm by now for making sense between the two?
In: Technology
Languages are very complex, and English and Chinese are like polar opposites.
Imagine a language where “blue”, “fish”, “sky” and “rock” are all represented by the word “frog”. And there is no verb conjugation.
Translating a sentence like, “I see frog”, becomes slightly more difficult… You don’t know if the person is talking about seeing a fish, the sky, a rock, and you don’t know *when* they saw it – are they seeing it now, did they see it in the past? Did they see it one time or many times (is it an habitual action?)
edit: The same can be said of languages that are even more similar. Time tenses are expressed differently in different languages and different tenses can imply different nuances (like the difference between “I will go there” or “I plan on going there” or “I am going there”). Sometimes a language has one word that requires a many-word explanation in the other. The Swedish verb “orka” is a great example – it means “to have the energy or force to do something”. As you can see, in English, that takes an entire sentence on its own to explain, and there are even many other ways that you will find it translated based on context.
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