Misunderstanding

Bats

In my last blog I touched the question whether a computer can give meaning to its manipulations in the sense that the computer itself understands what it does. For example, the Google translating machine translates the question “How many members does your family have?” into Chinese this way: 您家有几口人？(observant readers of my blog will notice that I had translated this English sentence in a different way in my blog: see the photo there). But does the Google translating machine understand the English and Chinese sentences in the sense that it knows their meanings? I think that most people will say: No, a Google translating machine does not understand the meaning of the sentences that appear on its screen, while man does understand what s/he says. Unlike a computer, man cannot only translate sentences but also understand the meanings of the sentences s/he translates. And an experienced translator knows that often a verbal translation is impossible and chooses a translation with a meaning that is as close as possible to the original text. Since translation computers cannot capture meanings, they often makes stupid mistakes. They “just” translate. Take these Dutch sentences:

- Toen mijn moeder aan de was was, zag ik twee vliegen vliegen. Daar was ook een bij bij. Ze vlogen onder de deur door, over de weg weg.

They should be translated as:

- When my mother was doing the laundry, I saw two flies passing by. They were accompanied by a bee. They passed under the door and flew away over the road.

I once tried to translate them with a translating machine and I got this:

- When my mother was doing the laundry, I saw two flies passing by. They were accompanied by a bee. They passed under the door and flew away over the road.

I am afraid that you don’t understand a word of the computer translation. Or rather, you understand the meanings of the separate words but not the meaning of the sentences. Apparently the translation machine translated the Dutch sentences word by word and didn’t understand the pun. Without doubt, in future this problem will be solved more or less, but there’ll still remain a residual category of “impossible translations”. Or is translating a matter of “Weak AI”, as Searle calls it? (see my last blog) But then computers must be able to “understand” puns.

Does a human translator better? In principle s/he does but not always. The Chinese poet Li Shangyin (c812-858) wrote a famously obscure poem, which has been translated into English in many different versions (now I follow, more or less verbally, Frith 2007, pp. 163-5). Even the translations of the title are different, so Frith: “The Patterned Lute”, “The Inlaid Harp”, “The Ornamented Zither”. In order to illustrate the different ways that the end of the poem has been translated (or how obscure the poem is), Frith gives three translations of the last sentence:

- Did it wait, this mood to mature with hindsight? In a trance from the beginning, then as now.

- And a moment that ought to have lasted for ever has come and gone before I knew.

- This feeling might have become a thing to be remembered, Only, at the time you were already bewildered and lost.

Each translator seems to give a different interpretation of the last sentence (and of the whole poem). Which is the right one? I think we’ll never know, for, as Fritch explains, “[t]he problem is that we have no direct access to this hidden meaning ... All we have is the text.”

Actually we have two problems here: Firstly, there is no context or the context is obscure to us. Take the word “bat”. It can mean either a mammal species with wings or a specially shaped piece of wood used for hitting the ball in sports like baseball or table tennis. From the context we immediately know what is meant. The other problem is the absence of communication between the interpreter and the speaker/writer/etc. of a sentence. Frith (p. 165): “... I want to communicate to you. ... But how can you ever know that the idea in your mind is the same as the idea in my mind? There is no way you can get into my mind and compare the ideas directly. Communication is impossible.” It’s what philosophers call “the other mind problem”: How to get access to the thoughts of the other? What you see here is that the absence of the other needs not only be physical but it can also be psychological. However, both context and access are important if we want to be able to understand and to know that we understand in the right way. Of course, the access to the other is only necessary insofar as someone else is involved. But the access to the other can seldom be complete and also the context is often not fully clear or it is obscure. If so, then complete understanding or fully grasping the meaning is hardly possible. What remains then is misunderstanding.

Reference

Chris Frith, Making up the mind. How the brain creates our mental world. Malden, MA, etc.: Blackwell Publishing, 2007.