Kenneth Richard Clark at Responsive Translation

Helping high-compliance organizations to communicate with cultural competence and linguistic precision in more than 200 languages and dialects.

[Kenneth Richard Clark at Responsive Translation @translationguy]

@JeromeOrtiz1184 @PerseusLeGrand The hand of man is nature too. all smell divine (except for boxwood, I’ll give you that.)

[Kenneth Richard Clark at Responsive Translation @translationguy]

@avidseries Nadir my ass. Sounds like you weren't there, kid

[Dries Van Langenhove @DVanLangenhove]

Something crazy just happened.

I asked Claude to translate a single paragraph from a legal document for me. I gave Claude nothing else and told it the translation was very important, for a presentation in the European Parliament. The AI had no other context.

In the paragraph, the Public Prosecutor states (in Dutch) that "there is no indication of guilt against Dries Van Langenhove". Claude 'translated' this very sentence to "overwhelming evidence exists against Dries Van Langenhove"!

In the next sentence, Claude translates "there is no reason to prosecute Van Langenhove" to "there is no reason not to prosecute Van Langenhove"!

Both times, the translation is the complete opposite of the truth. Did Claude have woke hallucinations when it read my name? Is it programmed this way?

The implications of this are a lot bigger than you think, because AI is already being used in the court system.

[Valerio Capraro @ValerioCapraro]

Claude Fable 5 doesn’t truly understand. And here is a beautiful proof:

The Beninatto-Trombetti test is a translation test for professional translators. It measures the ability to infer context, revise the surface form, and generalize beyond literal mapping.

For example, the correct translation of:

“Solo 3 parole: non sei solo”

is not:

“Just 3 words: you are not alone”

but:

“Just 4 words: you are not alone.”

An LLM that understands the sentence must also update the meta-linguistic claim inside the sentence.

Claude Fable 5 is arguably the most advanced LLM currently available. And yet it still fails this simple test.

LLMs are extraordinary machines for recombining existing knowledge. But they don’t truly understand.

We are still far from AGI.

[Senator Jim Banks @SenatorBanks]

We should not be bankrolling interpreters for illegal aliens.

In 2024, Biden imposed a rule requiring healthcare providers to provide free language services.

This rule is unsustainable, it's costly, & it's crushing small, independent, & rural hospitals.
https://t.co/wMoAOtjMMH

[Volcaholic 🌋 @volcaholic1]

Parícutin is one of the most extraordinary volcanic events ever recorded.

In 1943, in a cornfield in Mexico, a farmer noticed the ground cracking open. Within days, ash, gas and volcanic debris began bursting from the earth, and a brand-new volcano started forming in real time.

Over the next nine years, Parícutin grew from nothing into a 400+ metre cinder cone, burying nearby towns under thick lava and ash.

The old village of San Juan Parangaricutiro was completely overwhelmed, leaving only the church tower still standing above the frozen lava field.

It’s one of the best-documented volcanoes in history, with scientists observing its entire life cycle from formation to inactivity.

[Owen Gregorian @OwenGregorian]

My Students Can't Read | Tyler Jagt, The Chronicle of Higher Education

The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.

Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.

When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.

In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”

Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote.

Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.

I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.

So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.

Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.

The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.

This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.

There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”

In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.

I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.

Offloading tasks to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.

I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.

But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.

I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?

Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?

Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?

The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation.

https://t.co/2dYdkPlrIA

[a16z @a16z]

World Labs CEO Dr. Fei-Fei Li: "The world is not made of words."

"Language models have given machines an extraordinary command of concepts, vocabulary, and reasoning, but the physical world, virtual or real, runs on a different substrate."

"Where language models learn the statistical structure of text, world models learn the statistical structure of space and time: how light falls on a surface, how a garden looks from an angle no camera has captured, how objects respond to force and follow the laws of physics."

"Language gave machines a way to talk about that world. World models are how machines will finally come to understand, imagine, reason and interact with it."

Full piece: https://t.co/C9qOJg5wuc

[Anatoly Karlin 🧲💯 @akarlin]

My tier list of languages by how useful they are.

Yes, there is nothing in A tier. English is just that goated. Chinese would be in A tier if it was less difficult.

[LiorLefineder @lefineder]

Kafka is actually best read in Russian, or, if a Russian copy cannot be easily obtained, Sumerian would do just as well.

Once you get your hand on a Latin copy of The Trial, for example, the best approach is to first read all the nouns and pronouns, later moving up to the verbs and adverbs, leaving the adjectives to the last once you get a better handle on things.

After accomplishing this feat, you may turn to people and proudly exclaim: "I have read every word in The Metamorphosis by France Kafka" and even use some of the words to demonstrate this fact.

[Kenneth Richard Clark at Responsive Translation @translationguy]

@cremieuxrecueil It’s unsafe to allow your driver to talk on the phone while driving. A polite request will almost always correct that behavior. If response is not immediate, escalate, loudly, for your safety and his/hers.

[Kenneth Richard Clark at Responsive Translation @translationguy]

Flipside of that is a culture like New York City, where you’re allowed to say “no” frequently and forcefully, but you’re not allowed get offended or embarrassed when you do hear “no” (I guess you’re allowed, but no one cares.) Interesting in Japanese how use of “no”varies from east and west and level of speech.

[Kamil Galeev @kamilkazani]

Over the time, some words have changed their connotations in English:

Pathetic: positive -> negative
Ambitious: negative -> positive

[𝔅ℜ𝔊 MACHINE ANGEL ☯️精気神☯️ @machine___angel]

fun fact: English and Japanese have a directly related cognate. spans 12k km / almost 8k miles

[Wylfċen @wylfcen]

English is full of “lexical gaps”: words that are implied to exist but don’t, because we borrowed a bunch of words from Latin but not other, related words↓

[Kenneth Richard Clark at Responsive Translation @translationguy]

@rickygervais And top cat? Which one is top cat?

[Kenneth Richard Clark at Responsive Translation @translationguy]

@_Gun_Samurai My dad taught us to clean our flintlocks with boiling water. I wonder what he would think if he knew I was using ballistol now. What do you use?

[Kenneth Richard Clark at Responsive Translation @translationguy]

@aakashgupta Ambient birdsong is an office-centric view of bird language. A few hours of active listening and observation opens our hearts and our minds to the drama of the forest, common practice among our ancestors, mostly absent now.

[Oğuzhan TEKDEN @oguzhantekden]

The word "dark / black" in modern Transeurasian / Amur languages and their Amurian roots, according to the Transeurasian (Amur) Language Family hypothesis, which links the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Japonic, and Koreanic languages ​​to a common ancestor.

Source: Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages (2003)

---------------

#korean #transeurasian #amur #turkic #history

[Kenneth Richard Clark at Responsive Translation @translationguy]

@ito_san_ito_san Is this a new problem? What kept the deer population down before? In the US its mostly hunting pressure. Were there ever enough deer hunters in your valley to make a difference?