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