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Mike
1 year ago

What does a lady have to do to get her name spelled right?

Ohana Non No K. . .

Bill
7 months ago
Reply to  Mike

The trouble is there are three major kunyomi readings for 小 (chii-, ko-, and o-), 6 or more rarer kunyomi readings, and an onyomi reading. Context and memorization is really the only way to get it right.
Even if you can get train a language model to pick up on context to use the correct reading, the reading of names has no context. Whichever pronunciation of several is correct depends on the person who decided it. By comparison, it would be like if your parents could have decided that the letters “M” “i” “k” “e” are pronounced “Davontarius”.
MTL will only be able to guess the most common pronunciation. In this case, “chii-” is most common, but only used when followed by -さい. Chiisai means small. Even when the meaning of the name is “little flower”, it’s never read as “chiisai hana”, so the machine eschewed that translation. However, the machine had no reason to discard the next most common reading of “ko-“. Also, some translators have mistaken her name for “little flower” as they did in BOBB-333 and REBD-750, so “kohana” is an improvement, right?