But why is it in English?

One reason I tend to write and think so much about the war — apart from believing that it may turn out to have been a mistake of 1914 proportions — is that the blogs I read are overwhelmingly American and so concerned overwhelmingly with American mistakes. Here’s a refreshing change.

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7 Responses to But why is it in English?

  1. Oliver Morton says:

    In convoluted answer to your question, maybe it is in english because if it wasn’t Patrick wouldn’t have spotted it and bought it to your attention…

    ever, o

  2. Rupert says:

    Yeah. Where is the autotranslating Internet? For the past n years, I’ve been cutting and pasting URLs into Babelfish. Rest of world: five years of solid development. Online translation: stuck solid in 1998.

    If any area of online could do with a bit more magic, it should be this. I should be able to seamlessly browse away, as ignorant of the source language as my English birthright demands. It’s not the quality of the translation that matters — I can decode Oracle press releases, so I can cope with machine Janglish — it’s the simple, obvious stuff that hasn’t happened.

    There is the risk of Adams’ Corollary to the Babelfish, but I’ll live with that…

    R

  3. David Weman says:

    English is certainly a European language, as well as being the international lingua franca – and the European lingua franca. I, who is not an anglophone, thinks this is a great development. Scott, an anglophone, is I suspect more ambivalent.

    Anyway, thanks for the link!

  4. el Patron says:

    As an anglophone once more or less bilingual in Swedish, and brought up on the tradition that French was the lingua franca of the educated classes, I think the loss to England is immense if English becomes the lingua franca. I know it’s good for everyone else; but even so, I’d rather we used German or French. this is partly because the effects on other languaes of English seem to me nasty and tending to smudge things out. When you import from highly inflected languages like Latin, or, to some extent german, you preserve distinctions. When you import from informal languages like English, you tend to lose them. I just prefer the educated Swedish of fifty years ago, when people were trying to write German, to the modern dialects, where they’re trying to write American.

    but that’s just denna sajts opinion, va.

  5. sigh – I’m worse than ambivalent about the global rise of English. In a world where everyone speaks English, being an anglophone isn’t worth a hill of beans. Besides, it doesn’t mean that everyone knows English, it means that everyone thinks they know English and I have to put up with the crap they write because they think their English is good.

    Worse still, I write machine translation software for a living. There’s reason internet automatic translation is stuck in 1998. The dictionary methods that Systran (a.k.a. Babelfish) uses jumped the shark in 1998. Putting more money into that class of algorithm offers only diminishing returns. There is a new approach that works much better and only recently became feasible, but it’s not particularly fast and it’s very data intensive, so it is ill-suited to the ‘Net.

  6. Rupert says:

    “There is a new approach that works much better and only recently became feasible…”

    It might not be worth a hill of beans, but spill them anyway. There are things Going On out there that may change the ground rules about what is feasible, and what can sensibly be hooked into the net. What is this new knowledge of which you speak?

    As for the loss to the English if the world starts on the bona polari – well, it’s the least we can do. Perhaps English, which seems peculiarly suited to becoming nerdish, is just the right tongue for the time, and all those delicate inflections will have to wait until we’ve got through this growth spurt and can worry again about those tiny nuances that mediate a life spent in long exposure to a few others.

    R

  7. Well, Rupert, if you really want to know, google for something called “example-based machine translation.”

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