Great and important work!

This is related to why current Babelfish-like devices make me uneasy: they propagate bad and sometimes dangerous translations along the lines of "Traduttore, traditore" ('Translator, traitor'). The most obvious example in the context of Persian is of "marg bar Aamrikaa". If you ask the default/free model on ChatGPT to translate, it will simply tell you it means 'Death to America'. It won't tell you "marg bar ..." is a poetic way of saying 'down with ...'. [1]

It's even a bit more than that: translation technology promotes the notion that translation is a perfectly adequate substitute for actually knowing the source language (from which you'd like to translate something to the 'target' language). Maybe it is if you're a tourist and want to buy a sandwich in another country. But if you're trying to read something more substantial than a deli menu, you should be aware that you'll only kind of, sort of understand the text via your default here's-what-it-means AI software. Words and phrases in one language rarely have exact equivalents in another language; they have webs of connotation in each that only partially overlap. The existence of quick [2] AI translation hides this from you. The more we normalise the use of such tech as a society, the more we'll forget what we once knew we didn't know.

[1] https://archive.fo/iykh0

[2] I'm using the qualifier 'quick' because AI can of course present us with the larger context of all the connotations of a foreign word, but that's an unlikely UI option in a real-time mass-consumer device.

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unyttigfjelltol 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> in the context of Persian … "marg bar Aamrikaa". If you ask the default/free model on ChatGPT to translate, it will simply tell you it means 'Death to America'. It won't tell you "marg bar ..." is a poetic way of saying 'down with ...'.

All this time the Persian chants only signified polite policy disagreement? Hmmm, something fishy about this….

Edit: isn’t the alleged double-meaning exactly how radicalized factions drag a majority to a conclusion they actively disagree with? Some in the crowd literally mean what they say, many others are being poetic and only for that reason join in. But when it reaches American ears, it’s literally a death wish (not the majority intent) and thus the extremists seal a cycle of violence.

	▲	kranner 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Responding to your edit > isn’t the alleged double-meaning exactly how radicalized factions drag a majority to a conclusion they actively disagree with? Some in the crowd literally mean what they say, many others are being poetic and only for that reason join in. But when it reaches American ears, it’s literally a death wish (not the majority intent) and thus the extremists seal a cycle of violence. This is plausible, and again a case for more comprehensive translation. In Hindi and Urdu (in India and Pakistan) we have a variant of this retained from Classical Persian (one of our historical languages): "[x] murdaabaad" ('may X be a corpse'). But it's never interpreted as a literal death-wish. Since there's no translation barrier, everyone knows it just means 'boo X'.
	▲	kranner 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		From the Wikipedia article on the slogan [1] > معلوم هم هست که مراد از «مرگ بر آمریکا»، مرگ بر ملّت آمریکا نیست، ملّت آمریکا هم مثل بقیّهٔ ملّتها [هستند]، یعنی مرگ بر سیاستهای آمریکا، مرگ بر استکبار؛ معنایش این است. "It is also clear that 'Death to America' does not mean death to the American people; the American people are like other nations, meaning death to American policies, death to arrogance; this is what it means. Translation by Claude; my Persian is only basic-to-intermediate but this seems correct to me. [1] https://fa.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%85%D8%B1%DA%AF_%D8%A8%D8%B...

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4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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