I’ve found it interesting to run my writing through Google Translate: English → Japanese → English. I’ve found that the result is better in certain ways. For example:
It is more direct and uses fewer idioms.
Vague phrasing is usually eliminated.
Pronouns are often also eliminated, by positioning nouns closer to discussion about them.
The vocabulary tends to be more fitting.
It almost feels like Legos snapping into place.
This almost certainly happens because English and Japanese differ significantly in vocabulary and structure. The machine translation maps ideas to their closest equivalents, using context to choose the right word. When mapped back, this process repeats, finding a word with not only the right meaning, but the right grade of meaning and connotations. It also forces phrases to be rearranged within a sentence (or sometimes even between sentences), since English is SVO (Subject-Verb-Object word order) while Japanese is SOV (Subject-Object-Verb). Indirect meanings conveyed originally through sentence structure thus need to be made explicit. When reconstructing sentences Google Translate also tends to choose simpler phrasings.
I do like the exactness and directness of the result, but it is often a bit verbose. It’s also atrocious for creative writing. But if you just want to get your ideas across as clearly as you can, hitting “⇄” twice is very good at doing that. Of course, sometimes the translations are wrong. But Google Translate is now good enough that I’ve found the errors are almost always because my original text was itself ambiguous. If nothing else, this is great tool for testing whether others will interpret what you write in the way you meant it.
Have you experimented with using languages other than Japanese for that?
(longer cycles e.g. English→Mandarin→Arabic→English might also be interesting to try, in principle, though I’d guess that in the current incarnation of Google Translate Mandarin→Arabic is just Mandarin→English→Arabic in a trenchcoat anyway)
I’ve found it interesting to run my writing through Google Translate: English → Japanese → English. I’ve found that the result is better in certain ways. For example:
It is more direct and uses fewer idioms.
Vague phrasing is usually eliminated.
Pronouns are often also eliminated, by positioning nouns closer to discussion about them.
The vocabulary tends to be more fitting.
It almost feels like Legos snapping into place.
This almost certainly happens because English and Japanese differ significantly in vocabulary and structure. The machine translation maps ideas to their closest equivalents, using context to choose the right word. When mapped back, this process repeats, finding a word with not only the right meaning, but the right grade of meaning and connotations. It also forces phrases to be rearranged within a sentence (or sometimes even between sentences), since English is SVO (Subject-Verb-Object word order) while Japanese is SOV (Subject-Object-Verb). Indirect meanings conveyed originally through sentence structure thus need to be made explicit. When reconstructing sentences Google Translate also tends to choose simpler phrasings.
I do like the exactness and directness of the result, but it is often a bit verbose. It’s also atrocious for creative writing. But if you just want to get your ideas across as clearly as you can, hitting “⇄” twice is very good at doing that. Of course, sometimes the translations are wrong. But Google Translate is now good enough that I’ve found the errors are almost always because my original text was itself ambiguous. If nothing else, this is great tool for testing whether others will interpret what you write in the way you meant it.
Do you practice what you preach? I.e. did you run this very post through the same pipeline? :)
I did, but with significant editing afterwards!
Have you experimented with using languages other than Japanese for that?
(longer cycles e.g. English→Mandarin→Arabic→English might also be interesting to try, in principle, though I’d guess that in the current incarnation of Google Translate Mandarin→Arabic is just Mandarin→English→Arabic in a trenchcoat anyway)