"Language Immersion for Chrome", and a Better Idea

[Ziyuan Yao]

Google's "Language Immersion for Chrome"

Recently a Chrome browser extension called "Language Immersion for
Chrome" has been much publicized. Developed by "Use All Five Inc." on
behalf of Google, the extension translates certain words and phrases
on the Web page you're browsing to a foreign language via Google
Translate, for the purpose of helping you learn that foreign language
while browsing the Web.

I have been researching this kind of thing for years, and one of my
main standpoints is machine translation shouldn't be used in serious
language learning as it is error-prone: it takes a learner a great
effort to memorize a piece of erroneous knowledge, another great
effort to "unlearn" this wrong knowledge and yet another great effort
to "relearn" the right knowledge.

But I do understand online machine translation services like Google
Translate and Bing Translator are so readily available that directly
using them to do the translation can minimize development costs. Upon
seeing this news, I asked myself: "Can we use a kind of freely
available, manually prepared data, instead of machine translation, to
do this better?" And the answer is YES!

A Better Idea

Imagine if we have a database of manually-translated bilingual
sentence pairs (such as those multilingual movie subtitle files on
those subtitle websites), e.g.

(German) Er ist ein guter Schüler.
(English) He is a good student.

Now if a German wants to learn English, and he happens to be browsing
a German Web page that contains the German word "Schüler" (student),
and the computer finds out that this German word also occurs in a
bilingual sentence pair like the above. Now, the computer can teach
English for this German word, by inserting the above bilingual
sentence pair into that Web page, like an embedded advertisement. This
way, the German will learn the English word "student", and better yet,
learn it in a bilingual sentence pair! This means he will not only
learn the word "student" alone, but also its syntax, semantics and
pragmatics, all implied by this example sentence. As to phonetics, the
computer can use text-to-speech to read aloud the English sentence, or
display some kind of pronunciation guide above or alongside the
English sentence (see my recent project "Phonetically Intuitive
English" for such a pronunciation aid: https://sites.google.com/site/phoneticallyintuitiveenglish/).

That's the basic idea. But of course we can further refine this idea.
For example, if there are multiple bilingual sentence pairs containing
"Schüler", the computer can prefer a pair that contains words that
appear near "Schüler" on the Web page (i.e. context words). This would
be very useful if the word in question (Schüler) is ambiguous.

Besides bilingual sentence pairs, we may also explore multilingual
data from Wiktionary and Wikipedia, although their usage may not be as
straightforward as the model discussed above. I leave this as homework
for the reader.

I also intend to develop a Chrome extension based on the idea
discussed above :-)

Best Regards,
Ziyuan Yao
https://sites.google.com/site/yaoziyuan/

[pauljk]

"Ziyuan Yao" <yaoz...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:17d2f122-f704-40eb...@d33g2000yqa.googlegroups.com...

What an interesting idea.
If implemented well, I can't think of a reason why it couldn't
be quite useful.

pjk

[Helmut Richter]

On Tue, 15 May 2012, Ziyuan Yao wrote:

> Recently a Chrome browser extension called "Language Immersion for
> Chrome" has been much publicized. Developed by "Use All Five Inc." on
> behalf of Google, the extension translates certain words and phrases
> on the Web page you're browsing to a foreign language via Google
> Translate, for the purpose of helping you learn that foreign language
> while browsing the Web.
>
> I have been researching this kind of thing for years, and one of my
> main standpoints is machine translation shouldn't be used in serious
> language learning as it is error-prone: it takes a learner a great
> effort to memorize a piece of erroneous knowledge, another great
> effort to "unlearn" this wrong knowledge and yet another great effort
> to "relearn" the right knowledge.

The quality of Google Translate, albeit *much* better than a few years ago, is
much too bad for that purpose. It is good enough for quickly checking what a
text is about, not quite good enough for *exactly* getting the meaning of a
text, and unusable for producing text in acceptable language. In particular,
Google Translate often loses track of the syntax of a sentence while
translating all words correctly including those where the choice of the
translated word depends on context.

> But I do understand online machine translation services like Google
> Translate and Bing Translator are so readily available that directly
> using them to do the translation can minimize development costs. Upon
> seeing this news, I asked myself: "Can we use a kind of freely
> available, manually prepared data, instead of machine translation, to
> do this better?" And the answer is YES!

Several times, I have had the impression that Google Translate does in fact
use manually prepared translations (i.e. Web articles at the same site where
one is a translated version of another) to find translations. I, not being a
professional translator, even use this feature for translating *into* a
foreign language: (1) translate myself, (2) let Google translate, (3)
compare. Usually I stick to my own sentence construction but Google often
gives me a hint that another expression might be more idiomatic. I think the
reason is that Google has often enough found that expression in translated
text.

This practice of Google could have an interesting side-effect: if Google
Translate is often enough used to produce translations for the Web which are
in turn used by Google Translate as a repository of translated text, an
unidiomatic translation might reproduce itself and gain statistical weight for
future translation choices. This will certainly not happen for languages with
many manual translators like German or English but it might happen for more
exotic languages where the statistical basis is scant.

> Imagine if we have a database of manually-translated bilingual
> sentence pairs (such as those multilingual movie subtitle files on
> those subtitle websites), e.g.
>
> (German) Er ist ein guter Schüler.
> (English) He is a good student.
>
> Now if a German wants to learn English, and he happens to be browsing
> a German Web page that contains the German word "Schüler" (student),
> and the computer finds out that this German word also occurs in a
> bilingual sentence pair like the above. Now, the computer can teach
> English for this German word, by inserting the above bilingual
> sentence pair into that Web page, like an embedded advertisement. This
> way, the German will learn the English word "student", and better yet,
> learn it in a bilingual sentence pair!

Yes, I think this is what happens already now, barring the paedagogical
application.

The same example shows also the limits. The English word "student" has two
German equivalents, "Schüler" (pupil, student up to grammar school level) and
"Student" (student at university level), and in virtually all contexts, only
one is correct. For other words, it is vice versa, e.g. "Geheimnis" which in
some contexts means "secret", in others "mystery" where, again, these two
cannot be used interchangeably. Again other words have no single translation,
e.g. "gestalten" (implement according to careful design) which might be
rendered in English as "shape", "design", "mould", "create", "frame", "form"
depending on which aspect of the meaning is obvious from the context, which is
irrelevant, and which is important.

--
Helmut Richter

[Christian Weisgerber]

Ziyuan Yao <yaoz...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Recently a Chrome browser extension called "Language Immersion for
> Chrome" has been much publicized. Developed by "Use All Five Inc." on
> behalf of Google, the extension translates certain words and phrases
> on the Web page you're browsing to a foreign language via Google
> Translate, for the purpose of helping you learn that foreign language
> while browsing the Web.

That sounds like a stupid idea. It runs counter to the psychology
of how people actually browse the web. From what I remember,
usability studies show that people are very goal-oriented on the
web. They want get to a piece of information or perform some sort
of action as quickly as possible and they automatically, unconsciously
ignore surrounding parts. Even if somebody wants to learn a foreign
language, they don't want to learn it NOW when they're focused on
something else. Your translations are just distractions that will
be skipped.

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber na...@mips.inka.de

[António Marques]

Christian Weisgerber wrote (18-05-2012 15:49):
> Ziyuan Yao<yaoz...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Recently a Chrome browser extension called "Language Immersion for
>> Chrome" has been much publicized. Developed by "Use All Five Inc." on
>> behalf of Google, the extension translates certain words and phrases
>> on the Web page you're browsing to a foreign language via Google
>> Translate, for the purpose of helping you learn that foreign language
>> while browsing the Web.
>
> That sounds like a stupid idea.

THAT language was suredly uncalled fpr. I think you should apologise.

[Peter T. Daniels]

On May 18, 10:49 am, na...@mips.inka.de (Christian Weisgerber) wrote:

Some of us _consciously_ ignore the surrounding parts.

[Helmut Richter]

On Fri, 18 May 2012, António Marques wrote:

> Christian Weisgerber wrote (18-05-2012 15:49):

> > That sounds like a stupid idea.
>
> THAT language was suredly uncalled fpr. I think you should apologise.

I am somewhat surprised about this remark. In this very group, *persons*
have been called abusive names. Christian called an *idea* stupid, and he
gave good reasons for his assessment. Everyone has bad ideas from time to
time (for instance me who has worked the whole day yesterday pursuing a
stupid idea which leads nowhere). As long as we treat *persons* with more
respect than customary in this group, we may call some of their *ideas*
stupid if we feel they are.

Or is "stupid" so highly abusive a word in English that it is an insult
for a person to suggest he has stupid ideas from time to time? If so, what
is the correct term? "less than optimal"?

--
Helmut Richter

[DKleinecke]

Stupid is a very weak insult in my circles though it might have more
force elsewhere. In general my friends are so into irony that "we
will have to consider that" is nearly the worst put-down one can get.
Direct opposition to an idea is read as a sub-conscious acknowledge
that the idea has enough merit to threaten the person who objects.

My friends and I do not read Franz' posts.

[António Marques]

On May 19, 10:11 am, Helmut Richter <hh...@web.de> wrote:
> On Fri, 18 May 2012, António Marques wrote:
> > Christian Weisgerber wrote (18-05-2012 15:49):
> > > That sounds like a stupid idea.
>
> > THAT language was suredly uncalled fpr. I think you should apologise.
>
> I am somewhat surprised about this remark. In this very group, *persons*
> have been called abusive names.

The relevant words are 'uncalled fpr'. The language he used is
insulting and there was no reason at all to insult the person OR the
idea. It's not reasonable to go around insulting every idea you
disagree with. An idea can certainly be stupid if it meets some
criteria. That's not the case here. Thus, if you can find an adjective
that meaningfully condenses the problems you find with the idea, you
can use it. Not being able to do it and instead throwing an insult at
it is bullying.