[voxleone]

My personal analogy, useful in my early days: Translating is like finding a vector in another space that points in the same direction or carries a similar magnitude of meaning.

In other words:

The source sentence is a vector in “language A space.”

The target sentence is a vector in “language B space.”

A good translation finds a vector that has the same direction (same meaning, intent, tone) even though it lies in a different coordinate system (the new language).

[energy123]

I know what you mean, but semantics is about relative positions of points in a given space. Comparing two points from two different spaces is apples and oranges. I feel like this analogy should be salvageable with a small tweak, however.

[aitchnyu]

when did you develop this analogy? Is it well before 2015, when Google demoed a vector model that solved Man:Woman,King:_____ ?

[nyeah]

Yeah, I was hoping the article would say something about word vectors and linear algebra.