March 21, 2006
Google’s Language Tools
Google was recently given the highest rating in a government test (National Institute of Standards and Technology) of machine translation tools.
Google describes its "automatic translation" as being "…produced automatically by state-of-the-art technology without the intervention of human translators." This seems like a strange word choice, almost as if ‘intervention’ is being used pejoratively.
However, reading further down in the FAQ, I see that Google is careful to offer this disclaimer for possible inaccuracies in the translation: “While many engineers and linguists are working on the problem, it will be some time before anyone can offer a quick and seamless translation experience. In the interim, we hope the service we provide is useful for most purposes.”
Once again, an odd choice of words!
I think it will be some time before the translation experience sans humans is immediate, or in real-time as well as intelligible, but there are certainly varying expectations and definitions when it comes to requiring a “quick and seamless translation experience.”
I would like to think that for what it’s worth, a human intervention can be quite helpful, and what’s more, on those projects that go beyond the translation of a phrase or sentence, some of us pretty darn good at offering our clients a quick and seamless translation experience.
Finally, I leave you with a humorous twist on the classic translation/back-translation every purveyor of human linguistic expertise loves to perform, using Google’s language tools. Yes, it’s been done a million times, but I hope you’ll appreciate the humor of this one.
English:
Sally’s mom is very nice.
Spanish:
La mama de la salida es muy agradable.
Back to English:
The breast of the exit is very pleasant.
(The component that really brings the entire deck of cards down is, of course, the missing accent in “mamá”, which some of the other online MT tools remembered to add.)
posted by Evan Norman
2 Responses to “Google’s Language Tools”
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April 5th, 2006 at 3:59 am
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It never ceases to amaze me how translators react to translation software. What are you scared of? As for human interaction - are you willing to wait online while a translator edits your translation request for 100.000 pages or do you simply except the MT results however poor. OH and by the way my absolute favourite translation mistake comes from the breakfast menu of a 5 star Spanish hotel:
A selection of pastries with butter, jam and MONEY
I’ll have that breakfast any time and btw it is impossible for a system to make this kind of mistake. So the best translations as well as the best errors remain human….
April 11th, 2006 at 12:33 pm
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First, I am not a translator. I work for a translation agency, which pools human talent for projects where meaning is critical, such as the outcome of pending litigation or the safety of a product (you might be willing to have that breakfast, but will you use medicine when you are overseas if due to a shoddy translation you are unsure what the medicine is for, or how much you should take at one time?). Second, I was reacting to the general public’s perception of machine translation, not to machine translation itself. Too many people outside of the translation industry seem to think they can receive a perfect or even marginally flawless translation for their product information for free, and Google’s description of its language tools seemed to validate this.
You are correct. People make mistakes. You misused the word “except” when you meant to say “accept.” One mistake. If you are fluent in a language other than English, write your comments again in that other language and use a free translation tool to translate it into English (as opposed to making a “round trip” machine translation). Then, post it, and tell me it is as good, clear, and to the point as what you wrote the first time.