Re: [tlug] Free program translates Euro languages to/from English

[Drew Poulin <poulin@example.com>]

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> My social-science colleagues often complain that although it's
> possible to write precise scientific statements in Japanese, the
> resulting Japanese is so ugly that even a five-year-old will ask what
> planet the author was born on.  Hard-science types are much less
> likely to agree, but there are a few.

Please allow this chronic lurker to pipe in, since is a rare case where
I might have something to say.

Even after translating scientific and technical documents for 12 years,
I'm still amazed at the ambiguity permitted in technical Japanese.  For
example, when 以上　or 以下　is used with numbers, there's often no way
to tell whether the author means >=  or > or <= or < without having some
background in the field being discussed.  The absence of a distinction
between plural and singular is a constant headache.  And as far as
esthetics go, I don't think I'll ever understand how 300-character-long
sentences containing 5 or 6 dependent clauses could be considered
elegant.  And of  course the ambiquity problem is at least as bad with
spoken Japanese.

This is just uneducated speculation, but it has occurred to me that the
difference between Japanese and English, at least, may be that with
Japanese it's understood that the burden of understanding lies with the
reader/listener, while with English that burden lies with the
writer/speaker.  If there's any truth to this, maybe it could be
explained on a sociological level by the traditional emphasis on
hierarchy in Japanese society.  The reader/listener accepts the role of
student/underling, along with burden of understanding what is being
communicated, while the speaker/writer plays the role of sensei/boss,
who is free to be as clear or as ambiguous as they please.

As I said, just wild, uneducated speculation, but it would be
interesting to hear what others think.

Drew














> 
> I don't believe in Yamato-damashii in language (sorry, Mr. Ohta!), but
> Japanese definitely is going to be hard.  My linguistics professor
> ex-girlfriend whipped me and beat me into submission, so I hasten to
> say that Japanese is not inherently any less accurate than any other
> language.  All natural languages have equivalent expressive power,
> they say.  But I think that Japanese is "designed" for speakers with
> large brains capable of bringing huge amounts of context to bear on
> even apparently simple communication.  That makes it hard to translate
> to or from more context-free languages, and very hard for machines.
> 
>