When you're native at a language, you often don't realize that you're using an idiom. By that I mean when you use an expression that means something different to what the literal words mean.
Here's one I was thinking of the other day. In German, to breathe is just a verb: atmen. But in Danish, it's an idiom: at trække vejret. If you just found the straight dictionary definition of "at trække" you would find "to pull". "Vejret" is the weather. So if you didn't know that bringing the two together meant to breathe, you would end up being confused.
It gets worse if the idiomatic phrase has grammatical significance. "I used to eat meat". If you only just learned a bit of English, you would wonder what "to use" in past tense meant that had to do with the rest of the sentence. Or perhaps you would theorize that a word was left out (eg using a fork to eat meat). But you'd be completely wrong, since what it actually means is that I stopped eating meat, though I had done so for a period in the past.
My guess is that Japanese is far enough away from English that early translating software couldn't figure out these kinds of things. By contrast, I've never had modern LLMs write anything that didn't seem native, presumably because they are complicated enough to absorb the knowledge from the training data.
From the title this put me in mind of the "draco standard", a dragon head mounted atop a pole that wailed in the wind which Roman cavalry used when they charged into battle.
Yeah I know it's completely different, but HNers will enjoy discovering this rabbit hole so let me lead onwards: Time Team reconstructed one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNYcVuO-PoE :D
I strongly suspect the post was a joke, perhaps deliberately mangled by machine-translating it not just once but multiple times between different languages.
Note that in the original thread, there was someone who requested (in Japanese) to repeat the question in Japanese, and was ignored.
Trying to reverse engineer the translation errors when you know zero Japanese is absurd.
I'm only semi-fluent in Japanese, but none of it makes sense to me. "Runtime" (in the computing-related sense) in Japanese is 実行時, or one might use the English word tansliterated to Kana, ランタイム, but there is absolutely no connection from either of those to goats.
It seems possible that "dragon" might be a corruption of "daemon"? Under this assumption, it isn't too hard to figure that "pole" might actually mean "poll". Perhaps when the CS jargon was initially translated into Japanese, somebody slipped up and used a homophone.
It appears that the user is dealing with an error that occurs intermittently with shibboleth, an SSO interface. If some daemon is polling some kind of thing in a way that triggers an error, it would probably seem to happen at random.
This puts me in mind of 'English as she is spoke', a hilariously inaccurate English phrasebook written by a Portuguese man who didn't speak much, if any English and instead probably used a French-English dictionary to translate a Portuguese-French phrasebook into a Portuguese-English phrasebook. It includes such well-known 'Idiotisms and Proverbs' as 'to craunch a marmoset'
Chat thinks it’s a kana segmentation error in a list of possible hypothesized problems/causes that get mis-rendered as literal nouns, such as “XML風, 設定方法, 処理の流れ / 処理流” such that roughly
“XML style” -> “-style” -> “wind”,
“setting method” -> “-method” -> “pole”,
“processing flow” -> “-flow” -> “dragon”
(Note that XMl, setting, and processing are just examples to illustrate.)
The LLM assures me that “Japanese writers often end diagnostic questions with a compact list of possible causes (A、B、Cでしょうか？).”
Its final verdict:
“very likely the English “wind, pole, dragon” = MT literal translations of a compact Japanese list such as 〜風、〜法（方法）、〜流 (-style, -method, -flow). The pattern, repetition, and the fact they appear at question ends all support this strongly.”
It feels to me, without any external substantiation and without knowing anything about shibboleth, that "insult to father's stones" might refer to an error raised by calling code or a parent process, in protest of a condition caused by called code or a child process. Stones could be an overly literal translation of "steps." So something about the child process "insulting" the execution (steps) of the parent?
Oh and someone downvoted that. I love this site and all you wonderful people.
The triplet of wind, pole, dragon appears multiple times in the same order, so is possibly a single phrase that has been broken up into three parts by Google Translate. In error reports that I have seen, the second line would usually convey something about the user's system. For example:
> Minecraft installer keeps crashing, I'm using a Macbook pro 2014. (...)
Based on that, if I had to guess "wind" is actually a coercion of the katakana ウィンドウ into ウインド based on simple pattern-matching, then translated into "wind". I'm sure you can guess where this is going... that's right, ウィンドウ is "Window/Windows" (for an example of how it is used as tech terminology, see https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%A6%E3%82%A3%E3%83%B3%E3...). Typing ウィンドウ into google search also autocompletes with ウィンドウ 10 , ウィンドウ 11 (this should be easy enough to guess).
Then the whole thing can be read as
> When I try to install the runtime it throws an error. Does this happen a lot on Windows [Version]? I tried two, three times and it throws an error
[Error]
> That's not the exact error but it's about right. Is the full error in the runtime log? [Something]? Is this a problem with the JSP error handler on Windows [Version] when you install the runtime? Or maybe I just got something wrong with the runtime?
Otherwise I subscribe most to @brazzy 's point about this possibly just being a joke or a prank with multiple layers of machine translation. Still, this doesn't exactly seem like a big newsgroup so I don't see why someone would go to the effort.
This kind of translation problem is the focal point of Star Trek: The Next Generation, season 5 episode 2, "Darmok" (1991).
I watched it for the first time after somebody referenced it, as I did just now, as an example of this kind of problem. Despite my knowing the point of the plot beforehand, I found the episode was still interesting.
I wish I could mention this episode here for language enthusiasts to enjoy without revealing the main plot point (that idioms in languages are hard to translate). Shaka, when the walls fell. But I think the very act of mentioning it in a thread on this topic does so unavoidably. Temba, at rest.
19 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 49.3 ms ] threadHere's one I was thinking of the other day. In German, to breathe is just a verb: atmen. But in Danish, it's an idiom: at trække vejret. If you just found the straight dictionary definition of "at trække" you would find "to pull". "Vejret" is the weather. So if you didn't know that bringing the two together meant to breathe, you would end up being confused.
It gets worse if the idiomatic phrase has grammatical significance. "I used to eat meat". If you only just learned a bit of English, you would wonder what "to use" in past tense meant that had to do with the rest of the sentence. Or perhaps you would theorize that a word was left out (eg using a fork to eat meat). But you'd be completely wrong, since what it actually means is that I stopped eating meat, though I had done so for a period in the past.
My guess is that Japanese is far enough away from English that early translating software couldn't figure out these kinds of things. By contrast, I've never had modern LLMs write anything that didn't seem native, presumably because they are complicated enough to absorb the knowledge from the training data.
Yeah I know it's completely different, but HNers will enjoy discovering this rabbit hole so let me lead onwards: Time Team reconstructed one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNYcVuO-PoE :D
So my take would be asking if there are JSP settings(defaults,limits, flags) that interact With the runtime.
My 2c.
For the record the original question is much more enjoyable :-D
Note that in the original thread, there was someone who requested (in Japanese) to repeat the question in Japanese, and was ignored.
Trying to reverse engineer the translation errors when you know zero Japanese is absurd.
I'm only semi-fluent in Japanese, but none of it makes sense to me. "Runtime" (in the computing-related sense) in Japanese is 実行時, or one might use the English word tansliterated to Kana, ランタイム, but there is absolutely no connection from either of those to goats.
It appears that the user is dealing with an error that occurs intermittently with shibboleth, an SSO interface. If some daemon is polling some kind of thing in a way that triggers an error, it would probably seem to happen at random.
Why? Those aren't similar concepts. There's no connection between them.
Chat thinks it’s a kana segmentation error in a list of possible hypothesized problems/causes that get mis-rendered as literal nouns, such as “XML風, 設定方法, 処理の流れ / 処理流” such that roughly “XML style” -> “-style” -> “wind”, “setting method” -> “-method” -> “pole”, “processing flow” -> “-flow” -> “dragon”
(Note that XMl, setting, and processing are just examples to illustrate.)
The LLM assures me that “Japanese writers often end diagnostic questions with a compact list of possible causes (A、B、Cでしょうか？).”
Its final verdict: “very likely the English “wind, pole, dragon” = MT literal translations of a compact Japanese list such as 〜風、〜法（方法）、〜流 (-style, -method, -flow). The pattern, repetition, and the fact they appear at question ends all support this strongly.”
Oh and someone downvoted that. I love this site and all you wonderful people.
Whenever I open it, it gives me a good laugh.
> Minecraft installer keeps crashing, I'm using a Macbook pro 2014. (...)
Based on that, if I had to guess "wind" is actually a coercion of the katakana ウィンドウ into ウインド based on simple pattern-matching, then translated into "wind". I'm sure you can guess where this is going... that's right, ウィンドウ is "Window/Windows" (for an example of how it is used as tech terminology, see https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%A6%E3%82%A3%E3%83%B3%E3...). Typing ウィンドウ into google search also autocompletes with ウィンドウ 10 , ウィンドウ 11 (this should be easy enough to guess).
Then the whole thing can be read as
> When I try to install the runtime it throws an error. Does this happen a lot on Windows [Version]? I tried two, three times and it throws an error
[Error]
> That's not the exact error but it's about right. Is the full error in the runtime log? [Something]? Is this a problem with the JSP error handler on Windows [Version] when you install the runtime? Or maybe I just got something wrong with the runtime?
Otherwise I subscribe most to @brazzy 's point about this possibly just being a joke or a prank with multiple layers of machine translation. Still, this doesn't exactly seem like a big newsgroup so I don't see why someone would go to the effort.
I watched it for the first time after somebody referenced it, as I did just now, as an example of this kind of problem. Despite my knowing the point of the plot beforehand, I found the episode was still interesting.
I wish I could mention this episode here for language enthusiasts to enjoy without revealing the main plot point (that idioms in languages are hard to translate). Shaka, when the walls fell. But I think the very act of mentioning it in a thread on this topic does so unavoidably. Temba, at rest.