Reminder that Claude is really good for Chinese grammar

This shouldn’t surprise anybody who uses LLMs a lot, but LLMs are really good at common languages and translation. When practising Chinese today, a sentence which confused me was:

1993 年，由美国、俄罗斯、日本、加拿大、巴西和欧洲空间局的16 个成员国共同筹建的国际空间站上马了

I couldn’t figure out exactly how to parse the sentence, so I asked Claude 3.7 sonnet:

Can you help me parse this sentence fragment? Not sure what verb 由 refers to here.

1993 年，由美国、俄罗斯、日本、加拿大、巴西和欧洲空间局的16 个成员国共同筹建的国际空间站上马了

It responded:

The 由 in this sentence refers to the verb 筹建 (to plan and build).

In this sentence structure:

• 由 introduces the agents performing an action
• The action is 筹建 (planning and building)
• The entire phrase “由美国、俄罗斯、日本、加拿大、巴西和欧洲空间局的16个成员国共同筹建的” is an attributive clause modifying 国际空间站 (International Space Station)
• The main verb of the sentence is 上马 (to launch/get underway)

So the sentence translates to: “In 1993, the International Space Station, which was jointly planned and built by the USA, Russia, Japan, Canada, Brazil and the 16 member countries of ESA, was launched/got underway.”

The key insight is that 由…筹建的 forms a passive participial phrase (“planned and built by…”) that describes the International Space Station, while 上马了 is the main predicate of the sentence.

Very sensible. If you are confused by a sentence when learning a language, you should definitely try directly asking an LLM! It’s easy and can work very well!