Just finished watching Arrival.
Language is the foundation of civilization.
It is the glue that holds the people together. It is the first weapon drawn in a conflict.
Hear too much that machine translation will replace human translation of these words. To be honest, no one who says these words understands machine translation.
Because they don't know that the biggest difficulty in translation is actually how to translate the culture of the target language. To put it simply, it is like the heroine in the movie translates the purpose of aliens into weapons, but humans without cultural background use their own knowledge to understand them as weapons in war. In fact, what the aliens want to express is to bring Tools to save humanity.
There are a lot of literatures about how to model machine translation to improve translation accuracy. I have also seen a literature on adding background knowledge to improve translation accuracy, but the actual machine translation that actually involves the cultural level has never appeared, because the subject of culture , It is really huge and complicated, the difference between Chinese and Western cultures is the language gap! This is the main difference between human translation and machine translation!
In a word, language translation can be replaced, but it will take another 20 years to translate the cultural gap! How do you model mathematically? This is a problem only liberal arts students can solve.
But Coming to the film precisely articulates this cultural divide, and that's where it fascinated.
In addition, I like to come to this movie, most likely because of my own profession, in the technology industry translation, there are too many people question us human translators. Standing on the commanding heights of science and technology, a casual sentence negates the value and usefulness of human translation. Li Yanhong is like this, standing in the position of CEO, saying that machine translation will replace human translation in the next n years, inciting the media and the public. And it turns out that Baidu Translate is worse than Google Translate 20 years ago. And the public who do not know why will not think seriously, "feeling" Li Yanhong is right, how many years ahead can replace human translation. How many scientific and technical personnel, pretending to understand well, came to me and told me that Li Yanhong said that human translation will soon be replaced by machines, and then you will lose your job. Well, in the future, if there are such people, I will reply like this: The earliest jobs replaced by artificial intelligence machine learning are actually your programmers! Why, using machine learning methods to master JAVA, C++, python is much easier than mastering English, these have no background knowledge and cultural input, you can master them casually through multiple machine learning, but English, wait until one day you completely After understanding the culture of the entire Western society, I told me to replace manual translation. People in the programmer technology industry should first think about whether they can lose a job.
Science like AI could make many people lose their job, even programmer, why? Mastering Java language by a machine is much easier than mastering English definitely.
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Besides this, what draws my attention is the role of the main actress:
Doctoral degree of linguistics,
Crack problems of translations,
A married women and most importantly,
A mother
That is why this movie kill me in every single way.
I dream to be a doctor of computing(maybe one day I could crack this out)
I dream to become important interpreter in my career.
And also knowing exactly that how she feels when u have your child.
And all I can do is to embrace your destiny with love. Only when we embrace them, we can see the beauty of our own life. Then anything else, even death is secondary.
Finally, to end with the words of the general's wife:
It is your courage to help save the world,
War does not make heroes, only orphans and widows are left behind.
Love this movie
above
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