Transcription
Dear friends,
Hello everyone! Today, I am truly in shock. I want to share with you why I am shocked, and I’m not sure whether to announce that video or just record what I wanted to say right here.
So, yesterday, I had the following idea. This video has been on YouTube for 11 years; it’s a pretty good video called "How to Learn Any Language in 6 Months," by Chris Lonsdale.
What started it all was that I rewatched this video and realized there’s a lot of great and interesting content in it. I wanted to do a review of this video, but the guy speaks in English. So, I thought, why not see if there’s already a good translation? After all, this video is 11 years old, so surely someone has translated it well into Russian without any mistakes.
I thought I’d play the dubbed version in Russian, and we could watch it together. Not the whole video, just some fragments, and I would comment on what I agree with and what I might disagree with based on my own experience.
I started looking for translations of this video into Russian. The first thing I noticed was that there are many translations available in the settings of this video. Of course, there’s also a version with Russian subtitles. But I thought it might be more convenient to use a dubbed version.
I managed to find a channel that seems to have a decent dub of this video. I hope I’m reading it right: Pavel Kromykh. At first glance, it looks like a quality dub. I started listening to this dub carefully, and I noticed that some parts just didn’t sit right with me. I felt that something was different in the original.
So, what did I do? Look, I have many tabs open here. This is the original English text. Fortunately, the English subtitles are super accurate and perfect. There are no issues with them; they are written by hand, and you can see that punctuation is placed correctly.
In fact, the English subtitles for this video are magnificent, with absolutely no complaints. Then, I have two more windows open. The first one is the subtitles I downloaded from the original video, which has 35 million views. The Russian subtitles are from the audio dub on Pavel's channel, which also has over a million views.
From there, I extracted the subtitles. As you can see, I’ve highlighted in bold the clear and quite serious mistakes in these translations.
For example, there’s a mistake where the person clearly wanted to say "measured" or something like that, but in this dub, it goes: "When I was little, I measured with the school." I often thought, "I don’t know about you, but I hear the verb 'measured' clearly."
Why "measured"? What does it even mean to measure with the school? In the original, he says that when he was little, the school was, from his perspective, okay. The school was normal. It could be translated as "I measured," but it’s not "measured."
For me, it’s a huge mystery. This part in both translations is also very awkward.
Look, the original says: "I looked around and realized that all these people from different countries were passionately fighting against Chinese, as if they really wanted to eradicate it." I don’t understand. I saw that the Chinese were passionately fighting to learn English.
But why "passionately fighting"? No one is actually fighting with the language. I saw that all these people from different countries were struggling to learn Chinese or were having huge difficulties with the Chinese language.
Sure, in some contexts, it can be translated as "fighting against someone," but here it’s just "struggling." The translation becomes awkward.
After hearing this part in the dub, I realized that something fundamental was wrong with this dub. But look at what the people who made the so-called official Russian subtitles wrote. It’s all very official, and they even state the names of the translator and editor.
But look at how they translated this moment: "I looked around and saw that people from different countries were fighting with the Chinese language." No, they are not fighting with it; it’s just very difficult for them.
Another moment I can’t help but mention is the most egregious example of translation incompetence. I mean this moment. I just listened to it again, and the so-called professional subtitles are completely upside down.
Here’s the key excerpt: he talks about the idea of hypnopedia, but unfortunately, it doesn’t work. Literally, it translates as: "But hypnopedia did indeed open doors for research in other areas, and we have incredible results, incredible discoveries regarding learning that started with this first question."
He’s saying that despite the fact that hypnopedia itself doesn’t work, it sparked research that did work and opened up a lot of new, useful, and interesting things.
But in the official translation of this video, look at what it says: "Hypnopedia allows for research in other areas, and it’s unlikely that we will find anything new starting from this."
This is just the complete opposite meaning. This is the worst mistake a translator can make when they translate white to black and black to white. Because of a translation error, the meaning changes to the exact opposite.
In this case, I have to give credit to the person who did the dub. They made a funny mistake, but in this case about hypnopedia, they didn’t make a mistake.
They say, "Unfortunately, it doesn’t work, but hypnopedia did indeed open doors to studying other areas, and we made incredible discoveries in learning that started with this very first question."
By the way, regarding why they made such a mistake in the translation, they translated a sentence that clearly has no negation with a negation.
In the original, it says "hypnopedia did open," and they translated it as "hypnopedia does not allow." My assumption is that they thought, "Since we have an auxiliary verb, it must imply negation," even though there’s no negation anywhere.
So, they decided to put it in Russian. It’s obvious that the translator didn’t know this very common construction in English. I don’t know how one can not know it.
When we use an auxiliary verb to emphasize an action, for example, we could say, "I really went to that party," or "I really did my homework."
If we use the auxiliary verb "do," "did," or "done" with another verb, we are emphasizing the action in English. This grammatical feature of English was completely ignored here.
The translator simply didn’t know, which is why I think they made this very sad mistake that completely reversed the meaning of the sentence.
But that’s not what shocked me the most. I might not have recorded such an emotional video if that were the case.
What shocked me the most was that I decided, out of curiosity, to open Yandex Browser. You know, there’s an automatic translation feature using neural networks with dubbing.
It takes the original track, or rather the original subtitles, runs it quickly through the neural network, and then it provides a Russian dub automatically.
To my immense surprise, I found that I looked at all the difficult parts in this dub made by the neural network, and it didn’t make a single mistake.
Where there were tons of errors by real human translators, the neural network had no mistakes at all. Everything was translated clearly.
Let me give you an example of this part where supposedly someone is fighting with the language, while in reality, no one is fighting; it’s just that the language is difficult for people.
Let’s listen: "I looked around and saw that people from different countries were struggling to learn Chinese. I saw how the Chinese were struggling to learn English and other languages."
Well, you just heard that the neural network handled this part perfectly.
So, the sad conclusion we can draw from our observation today is that sometimes it’s much safer to trust neural networks for translating content into Russian than to rely on poor translators who often cross our paths.
Not everything written on the internet, even on channels that seem somewhat official, is reliable.
This is not exactly an official TED Talk; it’s a TEDx Talk, a less official channel. But it still looks official.
Look, even the translator is credited; they signed it, so it should be good translation work. But as we saw, that’s not the case at all.
This excerpt is the most egregious, although there are many such instances in the translation.
I would have never thought that if you want to enjoy this video without any translation issues, please don’t rely on the subtitles made by people under this video.
Don’t watch the dub on Pavel’s channel. Instead, it’s best to watch this video with the translation through the neural network in Yandex Browser.
This turned out to be an involuntary advertisement for Yandex. Believe me, I’m still in shock over this situation.
Please let me know in the comments how often you notice mistakes by translators. In which work do you think the mistakes were the most egregious?
What do you think about the situation where a neural network, at least in the case we discussed today, translates better than an average, perhaps not super professional translator who nonetheless takes on this work?
And of course, let me know in the comments if you’ve watched this video. It’s probably the most popular video on YouTube about learning languages.
Would you be interested in me doing a review of it?
I’ll say goodbye to everyone now. Thank you for your attention, and see you soon!
Goodbye!