Help me understand please

[Ori]

Hello! I am learning Chinese on my own and I like to translate songs to add vocabulary to my knowledge but I often need to use translators. Here I have a sentence that I thought was easy to understand but I dont understand the translator's translation.  心中有爱没有不可能 to me it seems like-  love in my heart is not impossible as - in heart, have love, not impossible but the translator is saying it is impossible to have love. I guess my question is first: is the translator right. If yes how do you know what word is 没有 about?

Thank you!

[889]

What "translator" are you using?

 

See here at 2:18

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX_sovuCA00

[imron]

20 minutes ago, 889 said:

What "translator" are you using?

My guess is Google translate or similar, which gives:

 

"It is impossible to have love in my heart".

 

The actual meaning is something like "With love in the heart, nothing is impossible"

[889]

Probably parsing it as 心中有爱没有? 不可能! instead of (如)心中有爱//(就)没有不可能!

[roddy]

If you can listen to the lyrics and figure out how it's phrased (which might not be easy, I know) you can get much better results. Google translate:

心中有爱没有不可能 = It is impossible to have love in my heart

心中有爱。没有不可能 = There is love in my heart. Nothing is impossible

 

Of course, it's possible to get it completely wrong. 

心中有爱?
没有。
不可能!

=

There is love in my heart?

No.

Impossible!

 

[EnergyReaper]

10 hours ago, Ori said:

心中有爱没有不可能

Is it from the song 《天天向上》？ And the 湖南卫视 TV show host 汪涵 sings this sentence in the song.

[889]

Yes, and you'll find the phrasing at the link and time I posted above. Just listening to the song I thought it was by one of those sappy Taiwanese groups. Turns out it's a sappy Hunan group.

[Ori]

@EnergyReaper yes from  涵哥  in the 天天向上 song. I'm really beginning to study Chinese so I get that a lot of things are going to seem confusing but this show helps with understanding.

[Expert]

I think you need to post the whole song or part of the song for us to have a better context of what the sentence means.

 

what it means depends on the whole song. If the song refers to a failed relationship, the sentence most likely refers to “ it is impossible to have love in heart”. 

[Polyhistor]

Never, ever get into the habit of using Google translate or anything else. It's too easy, you want to keep doing it, but the actual meaning is so rarely actually conveyed. Instead, you will often get some pretty normal looking English that has absolutely nothing to do with the original, or something that looks like it could be right, but really isn't, which will make your understanding flawed moving forward.

 

The only time I ever use Google Translate is when I want a laugh and I always get one. 

[Hagai]

On 8/23/2020 at 8:52 PM, Polyhistor said:

Never, ever get into the habit of using Google translate or anything else. It's too easy, you want to keep doing it, but the actual meaning is so rarely actually conveyed

So what do you suggest?

If I am having trouble translating a sentence in Chinese, what tool should I use to help me?

[roddy]

Nothing wrong with careful use of Google Translate. Remember it has its limitations. 

[Lu]

Google Translate certainly has its uses. But it's best for Swedish or Spanish newspaper articles. It's fairly useful for Chinese newspaper articles, rather bad at Chinese song lyrics, especially without context, and spectacularly bad at Chinese classical poetry. And if your native language is not English, remember that GT translates everything by way of English, so mistakes and weirdness is doubled if you translate two non-English languages into one another. Best only use it to translate from or into English.

[Demonic_Duck]

2 hours ago, Lu said:

GT translates everything by way of English

 

That's really interesting, d'you have a source for that? I found a few posts suggesting that human contributors to GT have to use English as one half of their language pair, but wasn't able to find anything about it using English internally as a bridge language. This Google AI blog post suggests that the internal representation has a grammar that's a mix of many different natural languages.

[Lu]

10 hours ago, Demonic_Duck said:

That's really interesting, d'you have a source for that?

Actually no, not at all, I concluded it from seeing what happens when you translate various languages into Dutch. You get some mistakes that are clearly from English. But perhaps it's only in some cases, or perhaps it has changed since I last tried it.

[roddy]

It is generally the case, apart from a couple of language pairs. Article about it here.

[Demonic_Duck]

I guess in real terms this means that the grammar of the AI's internal conceptual language just happens to be heavily based on English for most language pairs. Probably not surprising, given that bilingual corpora heavily skew towards having English as one of the languages.

 

I probably never clocked this thanks to my blissful ignorance as a native English speaker. 长知识了

[roddy]

1 minute ago, Demonic_Duck said:

I probably never clocked this thanks to my blissful ignorance as a native English speaker.

Does make life easier, doesn't it...