Languages have deeply embedded in themselves the corresponding culture and world views. A phrase like "not my cup of tea" would sound hilarious at best in most other languages. Narratives are even more culture-dependent. The same sequence of events can be presented with entirely different causal relationships based on the values of the writer.

>A phrase like "not my cup of tea" would sound hilarious at best in most other languages.

Only if translated literally word for word

A good translator can find a comparable idiom that neatly replaces it in the target language, but it is rare to have idioms that match exactly in their applicable scope. It depends on the context, on the tone of voice, on the age of the speaker, on other visible or hidden social classifiers, even on the region the original speaker hails from.

This is something humans (i.e., experienced translators) excel at. It is something computers cannot do except at a very basic level — they lack the cultural knowledge and autonomous connection making capability needed.

In Dutch I could translate 'not my cup of tea' in many ways depending on the context. Some examples:

Neutral translation in lieu of additional context: „Dit is niet naar mijn smaak.”

Young person in a social context: „Dit is niet echt mijn ding, nee.”

Middle age manager in a white collar office environment: „Nee, dit is 'not my cup of tea', zeg maar.”¹

Ironic and/or cynical down-to-earth jocular fellow: „Dit is niet mijn kopje thee.”²

1: Note the literal borrowing of English. 2: A literal translation used humorously, knowing full well that this is not 'correct'.

If human language reflect human culture, and NLPs are trained on written text, is it impossible that they can have the cultural context to make such a translation? Is it impossible that an NLP can get a query like "translate this phrase into informal slang Arabic" and the NLP properly does so?

I find it improbable at this state, because 'understanding human culture' and bridging the gaps between two languages without compromising the quality of the prose depends not just on written text, but also decades of experience in being a human being in that society/language, and being able to make connections which may not be apparent from texts. A computer would also miss the final step: our monitoring function that accepts or rejects translations as silly, down-right anti-social, or totally apt — that well honed Fingerspitzengefühl that comes from the total sum of your experience and maturity.

You would, in effect, have to train an artificial intelligence with a brain capable of mimicking ours by raising it as a child in our society (sometimes cheerfully acknowledged by sci-fi writers who employ such characters), and even then you would need to have a brain that processes certain events, happenings, and subtle hints the way a human being roughly does.

Perhaps someone will manage to train one in a suitable manner one day (far far away — not in our lifetime), but I wouldn't want to be responsible for debugging it.

Someone will manage to make one that is good enough for some purposes though. Plenty of semi-gibberish manuals included with products that strongly reek of machine translation these days.

Nice examples! Please also do "Nu komt de aap uit de mouw!"

Don't forget the evergreen "Unfortunately peanut butter!".

You can always find a good-enough substitute, but the original nuance will be lost. The native speaker can choose between "dislike", "would not prefer" or "not my cup of tea". The target language may have an even wider arsenal of phrases suited for different social occasions and across varying levels of politeness. Essentially, mapping the input to the output is a lossy process.

Obviously. That was the commenters point.

The commenter's point was that there is information that can be expressed in one language but not another (they're not all essentially the same). The fact that you can't translate a figure of speech doesn't evidence this.

I don't want to put words into their mouth, but I think the comment was more about how we think depending on the language we use rather than the concept we're able to express or not.

> A phrase like "not my cup of tea" would sound hilarious at best in most other languages.

It sounds like total nonsense to me even in english. I know what it means but the entire cultural context surrounding tea is simply not available to me. I don't even drink tea to begin with. Always assumed it was some british thing.

Idioms don’t have to make sense, and often don’t, due to semantic drift and language and cultural evolution. Indeed, one of the defining properties of an idiom is that it has meaning beyond its literal, reductionist interpretation.

Of course they make sense. Maybe they don't make sense today but they made sense back then to the people who started using the idiom. That's what I meant by cultural context. Something in their culture gave meaning to those words.

Eh, my point was that being able to use and understand idioms does not require knowledge of the original cultural context because their meaning has become uncoupled from their literal meaning. The saying could just as well be "it’s not my xyzzy of wargbl" and, if it became popular enough, would be perfectly understandable even though "xyzzy" and "wargbl" have zero meaning in English in and of themselves.

> The saying could just as well be "it’s not my xyzzy of wargbl" and, if it became popular enough, would be perfectly understandable

Yes, and it would still sound like total nonsense. I actually know concrete examples from internet culture that are pretty close to that. "I shiggy the diggy". Total nonsense yet becomes second nature after lurking certain forums for a few days.

The cultural context in the "xyzzy of wargbl" case is you made it up to prove a point. If it somehow became popular enough, fully understanding it would require the context of our conversation. It doesn't help explain the word choice since the words were made up to begin with.

Now that I thought about it, the "my cup of tea" thing must mean tea was extremely important to english speakers. Tea drinking must have been integral to their culture. They developed preferences and the concept of one's preferred tea made it into the language as a synonym for preference. Still surprising to me since this never happened to coffee or any other beverage.

You don’t need any cultural context. I’m not particularly familiar with boats, and different types of things “floating a boat” doesn’t even really make sense, but “Whatever floats your boat” never had an impact on my comprehension.

> You don’t need any cultural context.

Sure you do. At least if you're actually trying to understand what the words mean in the context they're used. I understand your "whatever floats your boat" example, including the cultural context. This tea business is completely foreign to me though.

I have no problem understanding these things. It's easy to infer meaning when they're used in actual conversation. When taken in isolation and without cultural understanding, these idioms sound like those made up sentences used for language practice.