This is the first time someone’s pointed something out about the way we behave I didn’t even realise and found myself realising they are entirely right
This right here ⬆️ is why machine translation will never replace learning a language, because language learning is about so much more than just vocabulary. Now, in this case Australians and Americans speak the same language, so at some point they might be able to figure out where their conversations with each other are going wrong (as seen above). But now imagine a German and an American and no-one speaks the other’s language and they’re just going back and forth with DeepL. In Germany talking about your achievements a lot and unprompted is often seen as bragging. A German and an American who don’t speak each other’s language and have never learned anything about cultural differences will eventually go away from that conversation with the German thinking the American is inpolite, braggy and self-centered and the American thinking the German person is reserved, cold and boring.
You can expand that concept to business letters and emails. Sure, I can put my business emails through DeepL and maybe I’ll even end up with a grammatically correct translation (it’s not a difficult text most of the time) but because of cultural differences the writing style needs to be very different in some cases! The example that stuck out most to me back when I was studying translation is a payment reminder our teacher showed us. Germans will just write “Final reminder: We have not yet received payment. Please pay the outstanding sum to the following account by [date] or we will be forced to take legal action” and it’s fine. The British letter looked completely different; something along the lines of: “We’re terribly sorry but we do not seem to have received payment in the above-mentioned case yet. Could you please double check if everything went alright and the payment has gone through? If it hasn’t we would be grateful if you could make sure we receive it by [date]”. Sure, a British company and a German company sending a reminder like that abroad could just put their own standard letter through DeepL, but if a German person got a British reminder like that they’d just be like “Lol, no need to be so pompous about it, why not tell me clearly what you want!” and well, if a British person got a German reminder, they’d probably be very offended. Now imagine that for correspondence that’s actually important for your business relationships with companies abroad. Yeah, you don’t want to be using DeepL for that.
Grammar makes language comprehensible; culture makes language alive.
Grammar makes language
comprehensible; culture
makes language alive.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
