• tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip
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    12 hours ago

    This Japanese interpreter did a TEDx talk about her work. She mentions a few issues with going between Japanese and English, like how subjects in Japanese are often dropped from sentences, so she once made the assumption to give a CEO a male pronoun only to find out that the CEO was female when she walked in the room shortly after.

    The interpreter also says that you can’t wait to have all the information about a sentence to start translating, so she likens it to “watching a thriller” because you don’t know whether the verb at the end is “going to negate the whole sentence”.

    https://youtu.be/P-ggxpMY9q0?t=143

        • Eyro Elloyn@lemmy.zip
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          3 hours ago

          I know it comes off weird to me because I’m a Westerner, but I wonder what cultural and cognitive benefits can be directly linked to having your language innately require the listener to actually wait, listen, and then respond.

          Or maybe I’m assuming it works that way, but when you actually live in that culture and language, you are more likely to predict what is gonna be said so the same kind of foot in mouth moments can happen.

    • baltakatei@sopuli.xyz
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      10 hours ago

      What if you take the speculative execution strategy and have multiple interpreters translating every possible semantic branch and then throwing out the recordings of the interpretations that were incorrect? 🙃