Xref: utzoo sci.lang:5268 comp.ai:4803
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ginosko!ctrsol!cica!iuvax!uceng!dmocsny
From: dmocsny@uceng.UC.EDU (daniel mocsny)
Newsgroups: sci.lang,comp.ai
Subject: Re: What's the Chinese room problem?
Summary: Sweet Talk.
Message-ID: <2281@uceng.UC.EDU>
Date: 30 Sep 89 19:18:41 GMT
References: <822kimj@yvax.byu.edu> <15336@bcsaic.UUCP>
Followup-To: comp.ai
Organization: Univ. of Cincinnati, College of Engg.
Lines: 70

In article <15336@bcsaic.UUCP>, rwojcik@bcsaic.UUCP (Rick Wojcik) writes:
> What criteria do you use to judge that a translation from one
> language to another is successful?

How about: the same criteria (note: plural) we use to judge whether
native language speakers can communicate with each other successfully.

> My position is that there is no such thing
> as translation in an absolute sense.

Two languages aren't even necessary. Two people who speak the "same"
language can misunderstand each other. Two translation steps are already
going on there---from the speaker's thoughts into a serial symbol
string, and then from the string to the hearer's thoughts. If the hearer's
thoughts differ substantially from the speaker's, then the translation 
has failed.

However, I think absolute translation *must* be possible in principle,
unless we believe that the human mind has an infinite information
content. That is, if we view communication as a thought-transfer
between two thinkers, then some finite serial data stream must
represent the thoughts of the speaker in sufficient detail to allow
the hearer to reconstruct them with arbitrary accuracy.  We may not
know how to move thoughts from one person to another as one would copy
files between computers, but the materialist assumption says it must
be possible. (If the brain turns out to be not a very convenient
medium to "write" on, then one might have to resort to physically
reconstructing features of the sender's brain in the recipient. "Let
me give you a piece of my mind..." This won't be an easy trick, but it
can't be impossible.)

>  A seemingly trivial example is the
> translation of expressions that refer to language-specific grammatical
> structure.  Thus, there is no way to translate French 'tutoyer' directly into
> English. You must rely on circumlocution.  It means roughly 'use the intimate
> 2nd person singular form of the verb'.  But practical translators might take
> an equivalent French expression to 'Don't tutoyer me' into English as 'Don't
> use that tone of voice with me', or some such thing.  But it is difficult to
> say what makes one such translation better than another.  People can get into
> heated arguments over such questions.

I'm not sure what you mean by "directly." Perhaps you should use
"concisely."  After all, we are English/American speakers here, and
Lo! we can certainly grasp some idea of the action "tutoyer" refers to
from your brief description. Since we start off without the necessary
concepts, you simply have to hand us the underlying knowledge heirachy
for us to understand. That doesn't make your translation "bad."  It
simply means you can't lop off the top floor of a skyscraper, ship it
across town, and expect it to float the same distance above bare
ground. 

You can speak concisely when you share a large base of common
knowledge/experience with your hearer. If you don't, then you must
recursively expand your high-level expressions until you reach the
level of your listener's available knowledge. Consider how differently
you might describe what you did at work today to your boss, to a
coworker, to a casual friend, and to your mother.

Thus translating a static word-string from one language into another
should be, in general, about as hard as inferring a person's hair
color by observing the mud they have tracked onto a carpet. A person's
language is essentially a set of high-level pointers into the large
knowledge network they cart around in their head. Without an accurate
model of that network, translating those pointers into another
language (with all its different cultural baggage) will be tough.
In any case, the "goodness" of the translation must always depend
on the recipient.

Dan Mocsny
dmocsny@uceng.uc.edu