This Japanese interpreter did a TEDx talk about her work. She mentions a few issues with going between Japanese and English, like how subjects in Japanese are often dropped from sentences, so she once made the assumption to give a CEO a male pronoun only to find out that the CEO was female when she walked in the room shortly after.
The interpreter also says that you can’t wait to have all the information about a sentence to start translating, so she likens it to “watching a thriller” because you don’t know whether the verb at the end is “going to negate the whole sentence”.
I know it comes off weird to me because I’m a Westerner, but I wonder what cultural and cognitive benefits can be directly linked to having your language innately require the listener to actually wait, listen, and then respond.
Or maybe I’m assuming it works that way, but when you actually live in that culture and language, you are more likely to predict what is gonna be said so the same kind of foot in mouth moments can happen.
The word order doesn’t really make you wait longer or listen more carefully-- you’re just getting the information in different places. Like if you looked at a sentence without the last word, in English you have “Give the ball to X” and in Japanese you have “Ball to John X”. In English you’re waiting to see who receives the ball and in Japanese you’re waiting to hear what to do with it.
The more confusing aspect of Japanese is that it’s a high context language, meaning that once things like subjects and objects are understood between speakers, those things get dropped from sentences. A sort of analogous thing in English would be use of pronouns-- once both speakers understand who or what is being talked about, we stop using the name for the person or object and use s/he or it. In Japanese, those pronouns would get dropped entirely.
Because of that, Japanese can be really frustrating for a language learner because you’re already maybe missing some parts of sentences, and so if you miss the one crucial thing that’s being talked about, moving forward you don’t even have a pronoun clue to give you a hint.
I tried learning Japanese and struggled for exactly the reasons you describe so clearly. I felt I might manage to learn if I were living in Japan and picking up the contextual clues but I could not learn Japanese effectively from a textbook. Visiting Japan is high on my wish list, maybe one day.
What if you take the speculative execution strategy and have multiple interpreters translating every possible semantic branch and then throwing out the recordings of the interpretations that were incorrect? 🙃
That last part is really funny for me currently learning Japanese.
The differnece between desu and janaidesu is always at the end, but makes (in my head) a “it’s like that” into a “it’s not like that” thus negating the whole sentence. A constant lookout for a “NOT” at the end of each sentence.
This Japanese interpreter did a TEDx talk about her work. She mentions a few issues with going between Japanese and English, like how subjects in Japanese are often dropped from sentences, so she once made the assumption to give a CEO a male pronoun only to find out that the CEO was female when she walked in the room shortly after.
The interpreter also says that you can’t wait to have all the information about a sentence to start translating, so she likens it to “watching a thriller” because you don’t know whether the verb at the end is “going to negate the whole sentence”.
https://youtu.be/P-ggxpMY9q0?t=143
“That’s so cool… NOT.”
But an entire language like that.
That’s literally how negation works in Japanese lol
I know it comes off weird to me because I’m a Westerner, but I wonder what cultural and cognitive benefits can be directly linked to having your language innately require the listener to actually wait, listen, and then respond.
Or maybe I’m assuming it works that way, but when you actually live in that culture and language, you are more likely to predict what is gonna be said so the same kind of foot in mouth moments can happen.
The word order doesn’t really make you wait longer or listen more carefully-- you’re just getting the information in different places. Like if you looked at a sentence without the last word, in English you have “Give the ball to X” and in Japanese you have “Ball to John X”. In English you’re waiting to see who receives the ball and in Japanese you’re waiting to hear what to do with it.
The more confusing aspect of Japanese is that it’s a high context language, meaning that once things like subjects and objects are understood between speakers, those things get dropped from sentences. A sort of analogous thing in English would be use of pronouns-- once both speakers understand who or what is being talked about, we stop using the name for the person or object and use s/he or it. In Japanese, those pronouns would get dropped entirely.
Because of that, Japanese can be really frustrating for a language learner because you’re already maybe missing some parts of sentences, and so if you miss the one crucial thing that’s being talked about, moving forward you don’t even have a pronoun clue to give you a hint.
I tried learning Japanese and struggled for exactly the reasons you describe so clearly. I felt I might manage to learn if I were living in Japan and picking up the contextual clues but I could not learn Japanese effectively from a textbook. Visiting Japan is high on my wish list, maybe one day.
What if you take the speculative execution strategy and have multiple interpreters translating every possible semantic branch and then throwing out the recordings of the interpretations that were incorrect? 🙃
Can’t wait for the Spectre/Meltdown exploit.
AI does this with MLM. I rest my case.
Why would you do that?
You have to wait for the last work in the sentence anyway so doing extra calculations to throw out later isn’t making it faster.
That last part is really funny for me currently learning Japanese. The differnece between desu and janaidesu is always at the end, but makes (in my head) a “it’s like that” into a “it’s not like that” thus negating the whole sentence. A constant lookout for a “NOT” at the end of each sentence.
American anime fans know you can get by with saying the English word plus “ZUUUUUUU!”