1

I am developing a language learning tool in Python that generates dual-language books intended to be read as audio books. The system should work by giving single word translations after every significant part of speech (verb, noun and adjective) that it is meant to translate. So let's say you know English and you want to learn Spanish. This tool takes a Spanish novel and copies it but after each verb, noun and adjective the translated English word is given.

I've learned that it isn't practical to do this using a traditional black-box machine learning model since those rely on context that is not available when being passed individual parts of speech.

So I am wondering what is an optimal method for translating these parts of speech with minimal ambiguity?

Improve this question
10
  • 2
    You can't translate words without context. It just can't be done. Context is essential.
    – curiousdannii ♦
    Commented Feb 22, 2022 at 4:49
  • I've guessed that but I think there are a good number of words that essentially only have one meaning.
    – Holden
    Commented Feb 22, 2022 at 5:14
  • Issue is that I have no obvious way to reconstruct from the output I'm given by my translator (argos translate currently). So one option is that I could make a function that reconstructs what the important parts of speech are. But I'm guessing there is a much better way to do it.
    – Holden
    Commented Feb 22, 2022 at 5:17
  • There might be a handful of words with no secondary senses, but the list of such words would be very small. But do their translations also have only one sense? The number of such word pairs would be almost non-existent. Consider that with all of the software developers and massive servers how bad Google Translate remains, and it does consider context.
    – curiousdannii ♦
    Commented Feb 22, 2022 at 5:19
  • 1
    It's not about how advanced the translator is. As dannii put it, translating word by word without considering context just can't be done. Period. The best human translators in the world can't do a good translation word by word without context.
    – Draconis ♦
    Commented Feb 22, 2022 at 6:25

0

Reset to default

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our privacy policy.