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Tag Archives: machine translation

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I saw this when I was in Shanghai. Great name for a shop... really attracts the customers

I took this when I was in Shanghai. Great name for a shop... really attracts the customers

It was with a twinge of mild sadness that I heard the news that authorities in Shanghai are looking to clean up the city’s linguistic image ahead of next year’s World Expo. The city which apparently is famous for quirky and sometimes downright bizarre signs in English has decided that the displays of prowess in using online machine translation systems, which have yielded such gems as the restaurant called “Translate server error“, bring shame on the city and must be eliminated.

I have written about the perils of using online machine translation systems before and while I haven’t veered from my original position that they are in no way a substitute for a real translation, I am a little sad that the kind of translation howlers you see while on holidays might be under threat. Apart from being incontinence-inducingly funny, they sometimes give you a fascinating  insight into the psychology of a language and even of a whole culture which you won’t find in any guidebook or in any lecture. Like a sort of linguistic crash scene investigator you can sift through the translational wreckage and piece together a story to explain what makes people tick. Of course this works best when the bad translation is the work of a human translator but even a bad machine translation can show you the idiosyncrasies of a language. I’m starting to see now what Lawrence Venuti (whose translation theories I have tended to dismiss as nuttier than squirrel poo, especially when he talks about ethnocentric violence) means when he pushes for foreignising translations. When you walk down a street with badly translated signs, you know you’re in a foreign country, not some sanitised, facsimile high-street that you could find anywhere in the world and that makes it more exciting.

Now for some reason the Chinese examples always seem to attract more publicity and it’s possible that the structural differences between the two languages might have something to do with it but there are hugely comical translation train-wrecks in all languages. For me, one of my favourites is the Welsh road sign which, instead of saying  “No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only” said  “I am out of the office at the moment”. It turns out someone at the council roads department sent an email to their in-house translation department where the staff were on holiday and had set an auto-responder with the following message in Welsh: “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.”[sic] Unfortunately our linguistically deficient council official mistook this Welsh text for the translation and had it printed on a massive sign and placed at the side of a road where it stayed until Welsh-speaking members of the public alerted the council. As people much cooler than I am would say: “Fail!”.

Thanks for sharing...

Thanks for sharing...

Anyway, if people start cleaning up their acts linguistically, especially in tourist-related areas, how much duller will life be? A lot probably. I like the fact that the English language is regularly dismembered by enthusiastic and well-meaning foreigners and I hope translation boo-boos like this don’t disappear altogether. It makes the language fun and it distracts from the carnage carried out by supposed native-speakers every day. I’m sure the same thing goes on in other languages. There is a book called Übelsetzungen which showcases some atrocious “into German” translations – if you speak German it’s definitely worth having a look. Just in case the worst does happen and mistranslations suddenly disappear, here are some classic examples of translations gone wrong courtesy of Charlie Croker’s “Lost in Translation”

  • “Good appearance no watermelon please”
  • “Our Mongolian hotpot buffet guarantees you will be able to eat all you wish until you are fed up”
  • “Smart noshery makes u slobber”
  • “Danger prohibited aboard this boat”
  • “We try our best to decrease your life”
  • “Be careful to butt head on wall”
  • “Please  take one step forward and crap twice”

Oh and one last sign which probably doesn’t need any translation…

And you thought Canada only had two official languages?

And you thought Canada only had two official languages?

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Nice try but I think I’ll translate it myself

The New Scientist is singing the praises of a new add-on for the Firefox browser which I’m guessing is supposed to challenge the dominance of Google in the browser-based machine translation market or at least provide an alternativet. Billed as the “Universal translator for web browsers” the World Wide Lexicon Toolbar is available from the Mozilla website and is claimed to make it much easier to translate web pages from one language into another. According to the Mozilla site, the add-on automatically detects the language of the website you are visiting and translates it into the default language of your browser.

The World Wide Lexicon Toolbar at work supposedly

The World Wide Lexicon Toolbar at work supposedly

No big deal, you might say, the Google toolbar already does something very similar (although it’s not automatic). But apart from being automatic, the add-on first offers human translations from other toolbar users, then it offers translations from machine translation services including Google, Apertium and others. Sounds really good, doesn’t it? It would be if the thing actually worked! I installed it and visited a couple of high profile German websites and nothing. Absolutely nothing. No automatic translation, not even an attempt at a manual translation. I even went to the Google.de website thinking, how hard can that be? There are only about three dozen words on the page but still nothing.
Now I know it’s only an “experimental” lemon, I mean, add-on but the developers really could have put a bit more effort into this. There’s an old saying about doing the little things well but this add-on doesn’t do anything at all except add some really ugly buttons to my toolbar. I also think the suggested $10 donation they are asking for is a bit cheeky considering it just doesn’t work. Until they get their house in order I don’t think Google will have anything to worry about. If I ever get the thing working, I might revisit it here.

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Do you speak Google-ese?

Nearly missed amid all the talk about the impending controversy about Google’s plans to digitise millions of books, possibly violating authors’ copyright in the process, was the announcement last week by Google that its instant translation function is to be available to users of its Gmail service. The idea is that if you are using Gmail you can instantly get a translation of an email into any of 41 languages at the click of a mouse button. Sounds pretty good doesn’t it? The horrible thing is that it is actually rather good. Google’s instant translation technology is based on statistical machine translation which, rather than using rigid rules to define how sentences should be translated, performs statistical analyses on large corpora or collections of natural text to tell it how to translate. The result is better translations and fewer mistakes.

Just because you get the gist doesnt mean its alright (not a Google translation incidentally)

Just because you get the gist doesn't mean it's alright (not a Google translation incidentally)

I’ve used Google for various things over the past year or so: in my translation technology classes to demonstrate how far MT has come over the decades, to quickly decipher websites in languages I don’t speak and even to book hotels by email and I’ve been impressed by some pretty decent quality translations even though it still gets some things spectacularly wrong or simply doesn’t translate them at all. Google is the first to admit that its system isn’t perfect but that at the very least, users will be able to get the gist of a text. Fair enough. At least they’re honest and realistic about the capabilities and limitations of their product. I am slightly worried, however, about the possibility that over time people will settle for “pretty decent” and that they won’t demand high-quality translations. Obviously nobody in their right mind would dream of using a machine translation for important texts, but if clunky, unidiomatic and incomplete translations become the norm for the small things, we might become blind to these foibles and start to consider MT for important things? Just look at how the “text speak” used in SMS messages has made its way into normal writing. Could mangled, machine translated language – Google-ese if you will – eventually become accepted as “proper” language usage? So while I’m all in favour of the advances in machine translation, both from a linguist’s point of view and from a nerd’s point of view, maybe it should come with a health warning against overuse.

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Translators to Face the Balka?

First published as:
Byrne, Jody (2003) Translators to Face the Balka? ITIA Bulletin, February 2003, The Irish Translators’ & Interpreters’ Association. p7

It seems that despite the 10-point plan outlined in the last issue to raise the profile of translators and interpreters we’re all doomed! Those clever eggs at HewlettPackard have come up with something that could conceivably see translation becoming a thing of the past, something to be looked back on fondly and studied in much the same way as scholars study Sanskrit. How you might ask? Well, what do you get if you cross English, Japanese and Esperanto? You get a hybrid, manufactured language called Computer Pidgin Language, CPL for short. Continue reading →

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