Language Log

About a week ago, I was composing New Year's greetings for friends:

Akemashiteomedetō gozaimasu 明けましておめでとう御座います "Happy New Year"

Sin-nî-khuài-lo̍k 新年快樂！Xīnnián kuàilè!

Kung Hei Fat Choi!

Шинэ оны мэнд хүргэе!

Felix sit annus novus!

When I got to the Latin, I was puzzled by whether I should leave "sit" in there or get rid of it.  I knew it must be some form of the verb "to be", but I wasn't sure exactly what form and what function it played..

So I put "sit" in Google Translate Latin and pushed the translate button, but forgot that I had the "into" language set on Chinese.  I was surprised / delighted / tickled when the Latin came out as Chinese "suí tā qù 隨它去" (lit., "let it go").  On the one hand, I was amazed by how colloquial it sounded, but, on the other hand, I thought it was a brilliant attempt on the part of GT to capture the grammatical sense of Latin "sit".

Big birds in the Bible.

"‘On Eagles’ Wings’: Comfort and Translation,The bird is most probably not cited in the Bible."  WSJ Opinion (1/6/25)

A dilemma.

Rosemary Roberts, of Waterbury Connecticut, writes:

Eli Federman’s op-ed “The Bald Eagle Is Heaven-Sent” (Dec. 31) brings to mind the beautiful hymn “On Eagles’ Wings,” which is often sung both at Roman Catholic funeral Masses and at many protestant church services. While most of the hymn is based on Psalm 91 from the Old Testament, the refrain is based on Exodus 19:4, when God told the Israelites, after their flight from Egypt, that He had carried them “on eagles’ wings” through their times of trial. The refrain reads:

"Will AI make translators redundant?"  By Rachel Melzi, Inquiry (3 Dec 2024)

The author is a freelance Italian to English translator of long standing, so she is well equipped to respond to the question she has raised.  Having read through her article and the companion piece on AI in general (e.g., ChatGPT and other LLMs) in the German magazine Wildcat (featuring Cybertruck [10/21/23]) (the article is available in English translation [11/10/23]), I respond to the title question with a resounding "No!".  My reasons for saying so will be given throughout this post, but particularly at the very end.

The author asks:

How good is AI translation?

Already in 2020, two thirds of professional translators used “Computer-assisted translation” or CAT (CSA Research, 2020). Whereas “machine translation” translates whole documents, and thus is meant to replace human translation, CAT supports it: the computer makes suggestions on how to translate words and phrases as the user proceeds through the original text. The software can also remind users how they have translated a particular word or phrase in the past, or can be trained in a specific technical language, for instance, by feeding it legal or medical texts. CAT software is currently based on Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models, which are trained through bilingual text data to recognise patterns across different languages. This differs from Large Language Models (LLM), such as ChatGTP, which are trained using a broader database of all kinds of text data from across the internet. As a result of their different databases, NMTs are more accurate at translation and LLMs are better at generating new text.

"Oh, you've never read The Odyssey???"

Your timing is perfect. Emily Wilson's translation is the best one in literally ages, has that sweet iambic pentameter to give it a "bouncy" feel, & makes dudebros cry that the classic has "gone woke". pic.twitter.com/zN5uSPTJSY

— Librarian Mama (@hyuumanatees) December 26, 2024

A couple of days ago we examined the mystifying Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese (LS/CC) collocation 惡惡 (here).  After considering several different ways to pronounce and interpret the elements of this expression, we decided that, in most instances, it should be read wùè and be rendered as "hate evil".

Today we'll go much more slowly and deliberately through a brief classical occurrence of 惡惡 to gain a better appreciation for the meaning of the dyad 惡惡 and how to appreciate its nuances in actual use.

Here I shall quote a short passage from Lǐjì 禮記 (Record of rites) (ca. 3rd c.-1st c. BC):

Suǒwèi chéng qí yì zhě, wú zì qī yě, rú wù èchòu, rú hào hǎosè, cǐ zhī wèi zì qiān. Gù jūnzǐ bì shèn qí dú yě.

所謂誠其意者、毋自欺也。如惡惡臭、如好好色。此之謂自謙、故君子必愼其獨也。

We've looked at the Chinese of the first item en passant before (here), but not in detail, and the English of this version merits investigation:

"Some idioms and terms pertaining to Japan's favorite grain", by Yuko Tamura, The Japan Times (9/25/24)

Rice is an essential part of the Japanese diet, so naturally it's also a part of the language. In fact, the word for "meal," ご飯 (gohan), also means "cooked rice." Before it's cooked, however, you'll see it referred to as 米 (kome). Below are a few terms and idioms that either use the kanji for rice or refer to it in some form.

• 朝飯前 (Asameshi mae): No sweat, a piece of cake. Something that can be done before breakfast. Ex., それくらい朝飯前だよ (Sore kurai asameshi mae da yo, That’s no trouble at all).
• 日常茶飯事 (Nichijō sahanji): Common, everyday things such as drinking tea or eating food that are a part of daily life. Ex., 彼の遅刻は日常茶飯事だ (Kare no chikoku wa nichijō sahanji da, His being late is a usual thing).

So says DeepL CEO Jarek Kutylowski.

"DeepL translation targets Taiwan as next key Asian market:  CEO says AI-based model is aiming to refine nuances, politeness", Steven Borowiec, Nikkei staff writer (September 16, 2024)

DeepL Write is one thing, DeepL Translator is another.  We've examined both on Language Log and are aware that the former is already deeply entrenched as a tool for composition assistance, but are less familiar with the special features of the latter.

The article by Borowiec, based on his interview with CEO Jarek Kutylowski, begins with some not very enlightening remarks about the difference between simplified characters on the mainland and traditional characters on Taiwan, attesting to the truism that CEOs and CFOs often don't know as much about the nitty-gritty technicalities of the products they sell as do the scientists and specialists they hire to make them.

The bottle of body wash affixed to the wall of the shower in the Cheyenne hotel where I'm staying is labeled in French as "Savon Liquide pour le Corps".

English "body wash" is two words consisting of eight letters.  "Savon Liquide pour le Corps" is five words consisting of twenty-three letters.

We've discussed the phenomenon of French verbosity versus English brevity before.  See  "The genius and logic of French and English" 4/11/23) and "French vs. English" (8/2/15) — also about "soap".

Surely, I thought, the French do not have to be that loquacious just to say something so simple as "body wash".

[This is a guest post by Thomas Batchelor]

I was recently looking at a tourist bus around the Matsu Islands of Taiwan, and they have a timetable online with the route and locations for picking up passengers, as below.

[VHM:  Don't trouble yourself by trying to read the fine print of the schedule itself.  Just pay attention to the note about the pickup location at the bottom of the schedule, which is enlarged below the fold.]

First, a few words about the text, after which I will introduce the Sinologist who undertook this monumental philological task, Manfred W. Frühauf.

English:

The Mu Tianzi Zhuan, or Records of [King] Mu, the Son of Heaven, is con­sider­ed to be the ear­liest and longest ex­tant trav­e­logue in Chinese literature. It describes the jour­neys of King Mu (r. 976-922 BC or 956-918 BC) of the Zhou Dynasty (c.1046-256 BC) to the farthest corners of his realm and beyond in the 10th century BC. Harnessing his famous eight noble steeds he visits dis­tant clans and nations such as the Quanrong, Chiwu, and Jusou, exchanging gifts with all of them; he scales the awe-inspiring Kunlun mountains and meets with legendary Xiwangmu ("Queen Mother of the West"); he watches exotic animals, and he orders his men to mine huge quantities of precious jade for transport back to his cap­i­tal. The travelogue ends with a de­tailed account of the mourning ceremonies during the burial of a favorite lady of the king.

From IA:

By way of introduction to what you see below under the asterisks, regarding the (not-always) technical reasons for the paucity of webpages in Mongolian script, see some of the comments here, especially the one at the top (Greg Pringle).

I might mention that the president of Mongolia's webpage in Mongolian script — which he links to — only displays correctly for me in Chrome, not in Firefox and not on my iPhone (Safari).