When I studied Artificial Intelligence, back in 2002, neural networks weren’t a thing. The limited compute capacity and storage available at that point in time meant that most artificial intelligence consisted of what is called “rule based methods”.
And as part of the course we learnt about machine translation, and the difficulty of getting the implicit meaning across. The favourite example by computer scientists in that time was the story of how some scientists translated “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” into Russian using an English-Russian translation software, and then converted it back into English using a Russian-English translation software.
The result was “the vodka is excellent but the chicken is not good”.
While this joke may not be valid any more thanks to the advances in machine translation, aided by big data and neural networks, the issue of translation is useful in other contexts.
Firstly, speaking in a language that is not your “technical first language” makes you eschew jargon. If you have been struggling to get rid of jargon from your professional vocabulary, one way to get around it is to speak more in your native language (which, if you’re Indian, is unlikely to be your technical first language). Devoid of the idioms and acronyms that you normally fill your official conversation with, you are forced to think, and this practice of talking technical stuff in a non-usual language will help you cut your jargon.
There is another use case for using non-standard languages – dealing with extremely verbose prose. A number of commentators, a large number of whom are rather well-reputed, have this habit of filling their columns with flowery language, GRE words, repetition and rhetoric. While there is usually some useful content in these columns, it gets lost in the language and idioms and other things that would make the columnist’s high school English teacher happy.
I suggest that these columns be given the spirit-flesh treatment. Translate them into a non-English language, get rid of redundancies in sentences and then translate them back into English. This process, if the translators are good at producing simple language, will remove the bluster and make the column much more readable.
Speaking in a non-standard language can also make you get out of your comfort zone and think harder. Earlier this week, I spent two hours recording a podcast in Hindi on cricket analytics. My Hindi is so bad that I usually think in Kannada or English and then translate the sentence “live” in my head. And as you can hear, I sometimes struggle for words. Anyway here is the thing. Listen to this if you can bear to hear my Hindi for over an hour.