There is no translation going on in that thought experiment, though. There is text processing. That is, the man in the room receives Chinese text through a slot in the door. He uses a book of complex instructions that tells him what to do with that text, and he produces more Chinese text as a response according to those instructions.
Neither the man, nor the room "understand" Chinese. It is the same for the computer and its software. Jeffery Hinton has sad "but the system understands Chinese." I don't think that's a true statement, because at no point is the "system" dealing with semantic context of the input. It only operates algorithmically on the input, which is distinctly not what people do when they read something.
Language, when conveyed between conscious individuals creates a shared model of the world. This can lead to visualizations, associations, emotions, creation of new memories because the meaning is shared. This does not happen with mere syntactic manipulation. That was Searle's argument.
Neither the man, nor the room "understand" Chinese. It is the same for the computer and its software. Jeffery Hinton has sad "but the system understands Chinese." I don't think that's a true statement, because at no point is the "system" dealing with semantic context of the input. It only operates algorithmically on the input, which is distinctly not what people do when they read something.
Language, when conveyed between conscious individuals creates a shared model of the world. This can lead to visualizations, associations, emotions, creation of new memories because the meaning is shared. This does not happen with mere syntactic manipulation. That was Searle's argument.