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2 months agoI was a caricature artist for 4 years at theme parks in FL, USA, and have spent a lot of time on likenesses of people from all over the world. It is really rare to see people who look really truly alike. Also crazy how some people have no ability to tell what’s a bad caricature that looks nothing like the person it’s meant to be.
I was just at a networking/research technology conference in Helsinki (TNC26) where the topic of nordic languages— especially minority ones—being under-represented by current automated transcription/translation tools came up in one of the side talks I attended. There’s some effort by various European NRENs and universities to train models on these languages so those tools can be more widely available to students, academics, and the public. The talk was about “Scribe” by SUNET (Swedish Research Network) hosting whisper models for this purpose.
That said, I do believe that learning a language by studying, immersion in the culture, and actually having conversations with people who speak it natively is the only way to really experience another language. There’s always something lost in translation if you can’t internalize a language by living it. In some ways language is one of the parts of the human experience that’s unique and irreproducible by LLMs (despite the name). Language is more than rote communication of information; it conveys ideas, emotions, the weight of memory and history.
Also, Finnish is fucking hard lol. I can usually pick up a bit of language wherever I travel, basic phrases usually. But DAMN trying to nail the epiglottal sounds of even “Hyvää yötä” threw me!
I only got to see Helsinki, but it was a beautiful city. The Finnish people I met were lovely with a great dry sense of humor, and I would love to visit again someday.
Kippis