I now have been for a little more than 2 months in Japan. So far I have been amused, fascinated, shocked, and surprised by various aspects of Japanese culture for the last two months, and one of them is Japanese language. I was especially surprised at how similar Korean and Japanese languages are to each other in terms of grammar and words. The grammar structures in both languages are very similar; if I read kanji in Korean pronunciation, that is exactly the Korean word; even some idioms and the expression forms are also very similar. I think Korean and Japanese languages resembles each other in many ways.
So, I have been wondering, if grammars, words, and even idioms are similar, then this would be the area where the machine learning could sneak into and work really well. As everyone knows by their experiences, the machine translation so far has basically sucked. Even if it works well, the expression might sound awkward that you would rather not use in daily conversation. This is currently the status of the machine translation. But if we tweak and apply machine learning into translation between two similar languages, then it could hopefully solve awkwardness of expressions because the computer might be able to "learn" new idioms and slangs and express the same feeling through another language if they are really close to each other.
Of course the translation between Korean to English or Japanese to English would not work well because the language structures are completely different. But I think we can somehow make a 100% perfect translation technology at least between Korean and Japanese; or any other similar languages such as German and English, French and English, Portuguese and Spanish, etc. Right now I am envisioning Korean and Japanese people having non-awkward online conversation using their own languages, or Korean people reading Japanese websites that would have been perfectly translated into Korean without awkwardness, and vice-versa, if this technology becomes true.
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5 comments:
I am glad you can pick up Japanese so fast. But you do know that both Japanese and Korean came from Chinese in the first place right? :P
i thought i heard my professor while i was reading this post for a moment.(with his very unique accent, shouting "learning computers" that is.)
Well if that's true, then I don't have to suffer while surfing Japanese websites Bwahahaha!!
kamil// It is true that Korean and Japanese borrowed many words from Chinese, but the grammar structures are totally different from that of Chinese. So I don't think they actually came from Chinese. :P
the green homunculus theory// This can also be part of AI (artificial intelligence).
macaronni// It will be really cool if this comes true..!
although it's not perfect for the translation, naver offers real-time translation web community(enjoyjapan) that translates japanese to korean and vice versa. I have been into it for sevral times and the words written on the bbs are understandable for japanese to korean. I'm not sure about the korean to japanese I haven't really used it. It might sound akward for some kanjis i think.But the point is that people can write or upload materials easily and they virtually communicate each other and seamlessly connected real time. and i think it's really cool technology.
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