Machine Translation Shifts Power | Hacker News Reader

Machine Translation Shifts Power

thegradient.pub

36 pointsatg_abhishek22 comments

I don't know why Christian missionaries are slammed for creating "the first grammar resources for previously unwritten languages". Yes, missionaries have done a lot of the hard work of developing orthographies for minority languages. A language you can't read and write is much less useful than a language you can, so developing orthography is an essential step toward preserving these languages --- and the associated culture. And literacy is very valuable, so teaching people to read and write their native language benefits them immensely.

I didn't read this as "slamming" missionaries so much as asking people to reconsider the framing of language-related actions under the frame of power. That is -- many people do see what Christian missionaries did as a uncomplicated social good, for reasons you laid out, but we should also consider outcomes like the decline of a language, and most importantly the role of power/consent. I thought the missionary example made for compelling comparison w/ modern day NLP work.

I don't understand why people get so sentimental when gravitating towards a regional mega-tongue is virtually always superior to small pockets of 'culture'. Culture is what the losers of history cling to because their way turned out to be a worse way. If the language had value it would survive plain and simple. Children rarely fail to learn their parent's native language if it offers actual utility to them.

“get colonized by a superpower” = “inferior culture doomed to fail”

You’re not wrong in the one dimension that people preserving a culture are by definition “losers” (otherwise it would take no effort to preserve), why don’t we try not punishing kids for speaking their mother tongue and see how that goes for a while?

Can't say I agree this is "plain and simple", as the way you're defining value here seems to be "might makes right".

I guess if that's what people believe, it may be tough to convince them otherwise... but IMO, it's really valuable to think about how the "winners" of history navigated tough moral challenges, and often did things that we can now identify as harmful.

In this case, it's not about making historical missionaries feel bad about themselves for "winning" -- this article (in my read, etc) is concretely about trying to avoid repeating these mistakes in modern tech, specifically NLP and translation. We can (hopefully) do better as a society than "might makes right"!

"Might makes right" is a weird takeaway from what I said. That you tried to refocus on corporations while ignoring my reference to the children was also strange. If anything, that you didn't address my point about the overwhelming utility of regionally homogenous languages is more telling of how much there is to fear. 'So what if some culture is lost when the utility gained was so beneficial' was my point. From everything you've said it seems like you don't actually disagree with me.

And corporations rarely fail to invest in long-term value over short-term value extraction?

Do you feel rhetorical questions that ignore everything previously said while speaking to a straw argument contribute to discussions?

Children are more or less defined by the short duration of their lives to date. They are, in general, absolutely awful at judging "actual utility" on timescales literally longer than their whole lives, and most people don't usually expect them to be any good at it either. Basing your assessment of the value of a language on the implicit decisions of children at age of language acquisition doesn't seem very convincing.

"Culture is what the losers of history cling to because their way turned out to be a worse way."

Or maybe its a sign that winners couldn't completely eradicate it because it occupies a niche in a more optimal way than the winner. Infact, we have seen winning cultures fail while the niched "loser" culture maintains, only to thrive after the downfall of the temporary winner.

It's even more amazing how she associates the evil of translating the Bible into native languages, with punishments for speaking native languages:

Some of the first grammar resources for previously unwritten languages were created by Christian missionaries in order to translate the Bible and proselytize to indigenous peoples worldwide. History is rife with examples of colonial subjects who were forced to learn the languages of their colonizers, often facing punishment for speaking in their native languages.

Surely any reasonable person would see that translating books into a language promotes, not suppresses, that language. Yet she links one to the other without missing a beat.

> Yet she links one to the other without missing a beat.

That's because the article's conclusion was written first, then filling had to be added to reach the pre-agreed conclusion.

I wonder if there is a machine that can translate this article from the language of political ideology into the language of rational thought. Unfortunately, as far as I know, machine translation is still subject to the law of garbage in, garbage out, so probably the only way to understand this article is to immerse yourself in the ideology.

That sounds like a worthy use for gpt, lol.

Comments like this are why I read HN before the left coast wakes up.

As for the article, it reads like teenage-angst Marxism.

Perhaps I've missed it, but it feels like this principle is woefully underused, as in, "not just translation."

Any task "offloaded to the machine" will always carry some level of power-shifting that is frequently under-noticed, and I'm surprised I haven't seen this concept expressed in a more general way?

This is actual manifestation of what you say online coming back to haunt you when you travel to the USA or countries using the same tech as the USA. You better pray that the topic modelling doesn't put words out of context & flag you. Wondering how would they even tie things back to a user, you'd need either access to the phone or their ISP to verify anything.

I see we're back to "US nationals can post whatever they like under any circumstances, but foreigners, even resident ones, will be subject to having a badly machine-translated version of their social media posts considered at the border by a political officer who can forever ban them from the country".

I wonder why the NSA is not providing the translation services instead of Google. I would assume they are more than capable of doing it.

My guess is that they are not, or at least, not in a way that would make economic sense.

The NSA doesn't have superpowers. They have a lot of competent people, paid to work on topics that are are important to state security, but I think they are lagging behind on topics with profitable commercial applications. And machine translation is one of these.

The reason I think that is that working for a three letter agency comes with a burden of secrecy, and obviously, people tend not to work as efficiently if they are not allowed to talk to each others. These institutions are also plagued with pork-barrel economics, and secrecy is also a good way to hide incompetence.

So if a private company can do it, it is better to let them do.

Is there even a clear line where intelligence agencies end and Google begins? Google was an In-Q-Tel baby, after all.

how do you know it's not the case already?

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