| It's not about 'imposing' a 1:1 mapping. It's about assuming a mapping exists at all for every case. It doesn't. While it does for the vast, vast majority of cases every language pair will have a non zero percentage of things that have no possible mapping that one could construe as a translation. The problem most people seem to have understanding this is two-fold: 1. They assume if you just had more data and better algorithms you could get better results. 2. They have never translated things themselves and come across a case where something didn't have a translation. Remove the machines from the equation entirely. It's not always possible in 100% of cases for people to do it. Naturally linguistically similar languages have more overlap and hence better success overall but that's really just a nice to have. No matter how similar English and French are, if you ask someone to translate a meme that started in 4chan or Reddit into French you will quickly encounter a case where attempting to do so just doesn't work. I'm sure there are plenty of better examples than that but I don't know French. It's an elephant in the room and stunningly few people seem to see it standing there. それは部屋の象で、驚くほど少数の人々がそこに立っているのを見ているようです。 Lol Google really?? In fact case in point 'elephant in the room' if it were used inside a joke that relied on using the elephant as part of the joke would not be possible to translate. It just wouldn't make sense. |
I think you are complaining about the literal translation of what is supposed to be a metaphor. I see your point, but I'm not sure that is as big a problem as you imply.
https://www.ukessays.com/essays/english-language/newmark-and... is some useful reading here.