For me the idea of expansive translations is fantastic. Every time I read a new post in Lesswrong that brings important information to the table, I think about translating it into Portuguese and bringing the information to the members of my tribe. But obviously I don’t think about translating literally, word for word, because I can see the loss of information that this would bring. I know exactly how I could write in Portuguese that would bring the sensations desired by the original author of the post, considering all the cultural nuances and inferential distances. When you really know more than one language you can see why and when it is a bad idea to translate literally.
So how could we improve an expansive translation system? Suppose I took this post from Lesswrong and translated it into Portuguese. Then I would post the translation of the post in a software or expansive translation platform for arbitrary sites. Our new expansive-translations dot com, ou our new chrome extension.
Translators in the platform could give a score (from 0 to 10) of how good that translation looked for different translation formats: translation for children, translation for people with little or no math background, literal translations, focused translations for people with visual, auditory weaknesses, etc. Also people who would come into contact with those translations could give a grade of how easy it was to understand the subject matter.
Thus, we could create a market for expansive translations focused on people of different styles. For example, the system could consider that translations by people with similar mathematical/computational background to mine would probably please me more than expansive translations focused on a lay audience. Obviously this would depend on the type of subject matter, because I am a complete layman when it comes to various subjects, but in general the similarities of my profile with the translator’s profile could be a proxy for me to find good expansive translations. Also, the score I assign for each expansive translation can be used to understand what kind of expansive translation fits me more.
It would be interesting if I could even select an expansive translation of each category. Today I want to explain what bitcoin is to my grandmother, what would be the best way to do that? Surely expert translators for this kind of audience would know how to do it much better than me. I would select a specific category and see several expansive translations sorted by relevance (a metric that considered inferential distances, similar characteristics between the one who wrote and the one who reads, etc).
Each person reading an expansive translation could also assign a score to the post. I can imagine the many problems that such platforms could introduce, but having a diversity of expansive translations would help a lot and I would certainly use it often. For example, a market I would certainly pay to be part of is one of expansive translations of scientific articles. By hovering the mouse over a paragraph of an article a pop-up could appear indicating that there were 8 translators with 8 different expansive translations for the same paragraph. I could click on a (+) and then select the expansive translations I would like to read.
Certainly each translator can elaborate the ideas of that paragraph in different styles, considering differential inferential distances from the reader, etc. Suppose I read three expansive translations among the eight. I could select which one pleased me the most. Then we would use machine learning to train a system that could predict what kind of expansive translation I would identify myself with the most in a set of expansive translations.
Maybe we could still do optional microtransactions for those good expansive translators. E.g., I select the best expansive translation and pay a few cents or microcents, as simple as a like button in the corner of each expansive translation. This way we could ensure benefits and incentives for expansive translators to produce the best translations as they could be rewarded in status and financially for anyone.
I can see a lot of ways in which we could monetize this system, so we could get more money to put on research and improve the system even more. Rewarding directly good translators is an idea to ensure that we don’t lose the best candidates. I will stop my babble here, but there are lot more I can talk about this topic. Very interesting this topic, ozziegooen. Also, I believe I could program this system myself. But let me know what you think.
Thanks so much Filipe, and I’m excited to see your thoughts on the topic. I think this kind of imagining is highly valuable.
I don’t have much context about you personally, but from my engineering and entrepreneurial experience, my main piece of feedback would be that I get the sense that you think this might be a whole lot easier than I think it would be. Something like what you propose sounds very interesting, but I think this initial proposal would be challenging to do well without tons of money and time. I’ve seen my fair share of people start far overambitious projects, totally (though predictably) fail, and be heartbroken as a result.
I think it’s worthwhile to do the following, but think about them in distinct buckets: 1) Imagine what great systems would be like with near unbounded resources. 2) Figure out what pragmatic steps we can take in the short term to get started.
Both of these are valuable. All of my post was in the former camp, and I would suggest that your post mostly is as well.
Some thoughts on the comment, in the vein of category (1):
Translators in the platform could give a score (from 0 to 10) of how good that translation looked for different translation formats
This is a minor point, but I would suggest a system where people rank who good the translation is for individual people (with many defined attributes), instead of trying to bucket things into different categories. Defining the categories is a really messy process that will leave artifacts. This is kind of a classic ML prediction sort of problem.
Thus, we could create a market for expansive translations focused on people of different styles.
I think that the current infrastructure for setting up markets in the regular ways are quite mediocre. Another option would be to hire a team of translators working full-time, but monitor and optimize their performance.
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On the topic of obtaining source data, using new content generation would be very expensive, and I could imagine it being difficult to do well. I think the word for “expansive translators” isn’t “translator”, but “communicator”, for instance, so the people to learn from are the popular communicators, not people with translation experience.
I think there’s already a lot of content out there if you’re a bit creative. There are probably tens of thousands of “What is Bitcoin” posts on YouTube and other platforms aimed at a wide variety of audiences, combined with metrics for how popular these are. If you could find ways of learning from those, I would be more optimistic.
Our new expansive-translations dot com, ou our new chrome extension.
Arbital had features kind of like what I’m suggesting. They identified a need, but found it very challenging to get people to actually do the writing. I suggest checking out the comments from that thread to learn about their experiences.
I’d be enthusiastic about making browser extensions to augment LessWrong in some key ways. It’s possible translation could start small; like with the replacement (hopefully with hovers that demonstrate this) of some key words with words one may better know.
For me the idea of expansive translations is fantastic. Every time I read a new post in Lesswrong that brings important information to the table, I think about translating it into Portuguese and bringing the information to the members of my tribe. But obviously I don’t think about translating literally, word for word, because I can see the loss of information that this would bring. I know exactly how I could write in Portuguese that would bring the sensations desired by the original author of the post, considering all the cultural nuances and inferential distances. When you really know more than one language you can see why and when it is a bad idea to translate literally.
So how could we improve an expansive translation system? Suppose I took this post from Lesswrong and translated it into Portuguese. Then I would post the translation of the post in a software or expansive translation platform for arbitrary sites. Our new expansive-translations dot com, ou our new chrome extension.
Translators in the platform could give a score (from 0 to 10) of how good that translation looked for different translation formats: translation for children, translation for people with little or no math background, literal translations, focused translations for people with visual, auditory weaknesses, etc. Also people who would come into contact with those translations could give a grade of how easy it was to understand the subject matter.
Thus, we could create a market for expansive translations focused on people of different styles. For example, the system could consider that translations by people with similar mathematical/computational background to mine would probably please me more than expansive translations focused on a lay audience. Obviously this would depend on the type of subject matter, because I am a complete layman when it comes to various subjects, but in general the similarities of my profile with the translator’s profile could be a proxy for me to find good expansive translations. Also, the score I assign for each expansive translation can be used to understand what kind of expansive translation fits me more.
It would be interesting if I could even select an expansive translation of each category. Today I want to explain what bitcoin is to my grandmother, what would be the best way to do that? Surely expert translators for this kind of audience would know how to do it much better than me. I would select a specific category and see several expansive translations sorted by relevance (a metric that considered inferential distances, similar characteristics between the one who wrote and the one who reads, etc).
Each person reading an expansive translation could also assign a score to the post. I can imagine the many problems that such platforms could introduce, but having a diversity of expansive translations would help a lot and I would certainly use it often. For example, a market I would certainly pay to be part of is one of expansive translations of scientific articles. By hovering the mouse over a paragraph of an article a pop-up could appear indicating that there were 8 translators with 8 different expansive translations for the same paragraph. I could click on a (+) and then select the expansive translations I would like to read.
Certainly each translator can elaborate the ideas of that paragraph in different styles, considering differential inferential distances from the reader, etc. Suppose I read three expansive translations among the eight. I could select which one pleased me the most. Then we would use machine learning to train a system that could predict what kind of expansive translation I would identify myself with the most in a set of expansive translations.
Maybe we could still do optional microtransactions for those good expansive translators. E.g., I select the best expansive translation and pay a few cents or microcents, as simple as a like button in the corner of each expansive translation. This way we could ensure benefits and incentives for expansive translators to produce the best translations as they could be rewarded in status and financially for anyone.
I can see a lot of ways in which we could monetize this system, so we could get more money to put on research and improve the system even more. Rewarding directly good translators is an idea to ensure that we don’t lose the best candidates. I will stop my babble here, but there are lot more I can talk about this topic. Very interesting this topic, ozziegooen. Also, I believe I could program this system myself. But let me know what you think.
Thanks so much Filipe, and I’m excited to see your thoughts on the topic. I think this kind of imagining is highly valuable.
I don’t have much context about you personally, but from my engineering and entrepreneurial experience, my main piece of feedback would be that I get the sense that you think this might be a whole lot easier than I think it would be. Something like what you propose sounds very interesting, but I think this initial proposal would be challenging to do well without tons of money and time. I’ve seen my fair share of people start far overambitious projects, totally (though predictably) fail, and be heartbroken as a result.
I think it’s worthwhile to do the following, but think about them in distinct buckets:
1) Imagine what great systems would be like with near unbounded resources.
2) Figure out what pragmatic steps we can take in the short term to get started.
Both of these are valuable. All of my post was in the former camp, and I would suggest that your post mostly is as well.
Some thoughts on the comment, in the vein of category (1):
This is a minor point, but I would suggest a system where people rank who good the translation is for individual people (with many defined attributes), instead of trying to bucket things into different categories. Defining the categories is a really messy process that will leave artifacts. This is kind of a classic ML prediction sort of problem.
I think that the current infrastructure for setting up markets in the regular ways are quite mediocre. Another option would be to hire a team of translators working full-time, but monitor and optimize their performance.
---
On the topic of obtaining source data, using new content generation would be very expensive, and I could imagine it being difficult to do well. I think the word for “expansive translators” isn’t “translator”, but “communicator”, for instance, so the people to learn from are the popular communicators, not people with translation experience.
I think there’s already a lot of content out there if you’re a bit creative. There are probably tens of thousands of “What is Bitcoin” posts on YouTube and other platforms aimed at a wide variety of audiences, combined with metrics for how popular these are. If you could find ways of learning from those, I would be more optimistic.
Arbital had features kind of like what I’m suggesting. They identified a need, but found it very challenging to get people to actually do the writing. I suggest checking out the comments from that thread to learn about their experiences.
I’d be enthusiastic about making browser extensions to augment LessWrong in some key ways. It’s possible translation could start small; like with the replacement (hopefully with hovers that demonstrate this) of some key words with words one may better know.