[madrox]

This happens without machine translation in the wild already with pidgin. If you want to see real life pidgin in action, watch korean and english gamers interact in FPS games. This has been common at the borders of cultures where two languages interact.

Point being, I'm not sure if language purity is more valuable than functionally allowing its people to interact with things they couldn't otherwise. Put another way, should we leave these people locked out of many online resources they can't read because we fear of corrupting their language? Give these people the option and let them decide. Language evolves over time anyway.

[makeitdouble]

People present these as the choice between 0 (“locked out”) and 1.

In real world instances (the proverbial 80%), it’s more often transforming a 0.4 (“don’t know much english”) into a 0.7. And the people who get away with near 0 knowledge will usually have no critical need for translation, or an access to other means (an actual translator, social help etc.) when really needed.

My mental image is grandmas reading online news, and machine translation would be a blessing and a curse. Or low grade school kids trying to look for some help on a topic, and a I’d wish they get more time with the original text to at least somewhat learn, than only getting the rough translation full of errors.

For interpersonal communication, people adjust, that’s what has been happening for centuries now.

[Tabular-Iceberg]

> This happens without machine translation in the wild already with pidgin.

I said nothing about purity, I said organic evolution, which this is an example of. If the actual speakers want to develop a pidgin, fine, I just think it should be a decision made by people and not models.