Language on this site
Summary
- The documentation on this site may only be available in one of two languages, Korean or English, depending on my time limitations.
- My Korean sentences on this site may seem strange due to unnecessary subjects.
- This is intended for machine translation, and I ask for your understanding.
- I am not an LLM or AI. (I wanted to say this!)
Will this be good?!
This is a post I wrote two years ago but never made public. After writing it, I became aware of this: Focusing too much on writing something that could be machine-translated well made it harder to write than I expected, so I kept it private and didn’t apply it strictly to this site.
However, as I’ve been writing, I’ve realised that my desire to strive for machine-translatable writing has grown. For this reason, I thought I’d make it public - after all, I don’t want to be seen as an AI.
Below is the text I wrote before.
There may be documents that are only available in one language
My first language is Korean.
I want to publish all the documentation in both English and Korean whenever possible.
However, my time is limited. For this reason, some pages may not be available in both English and Korean.
If you think it would be better for a document to exist in both Korean and English,
please let me know.
I will then reconsider investing time in the translation.
Subject may be used frequently more than typical cases in Korean documents
Korean is a language that can be easily mistranslated by machine translation.
In particular, the frequent omission of subjects in Korean is something that machines do not translate well with a high probability.
I don’t want my sentences to be misunderstood by machine translation.
So, I will try to avoid omitting subjects in Korean sentences if I think there is a chance that the machine translation will misinterpret them.
If I do that, there is a chance that my Korean sentences will sound strange due to the presence of unnecessary subjects.
In specific, I’m concerned that my tone might sound a bit bot-like or stiff.
However, I am more concerned about the possibility of being misread.
For this reason, I ask for your understanding in advance for any discomfort that may arise if the subject is not omitted when I use Korean on this site.
I also want to tell non-Korean speakers in advance that the Korean I use may be different from the Korean that is commonly spoken.
I also want to mention that this is not a guarantee that all Korean sentences used on this site will not omit the subject.
I’ve tried a few times to write documentation in Korean without omitting subjects.
When my brain saw the result, it protested strongly that it was too likely that a Korean speaker would have a hard time recognizing the sentence.
So, between what is comfortable for a Korean user to read and what is comfortable for a non-Korean user or translation program to read,
I try to find the right balance for each situation.
From a few tests above I mentioned, I recognized the following heartbreaking phenomena:
“brevity based on omission” vs. “clarity based on no omission” in the use of language.
It seemed impossible to optimize the trade-off between the two in every situation, all the time.
As a control freak, I don’t like the existence of this limitation.
But, there seems no better option. So I want to ask for everyone’s understanding.
Background
Over the past few years, I’ve gained a lot of good knowledge about Unreal Engine from blogs written in Chinese and Japanese.
I’ve also seen quite a few people translate these posts from non-English languages into English.
I think that’s because there are a lot of machine translation tools available.
I hope that other people will have other good experiences similar to the ones I had.
For this reason, I want to write in a form that machine translation can translate well.
I enjoy using English, but that doesn’t mean I’m good at it.
I have a strong desire to become more proficient at writing in English,
I would welcome any advice on my English.
Of course, you are also welcome to advise me on my use of Korean.