The Attempts and the Grief of the Translation Software

In his book The Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson takes a look at the problems of translation, furnishing us with such wonderful examples of English gone awry as this from a Japanese eraser wrapper.

“We are ecologically minded. This package will self-destruct in Mother Earth.”

Here, at least, the Japanese got their point across – we’re not under any delusion that erasing pencil lead is an impossible mission. But this message on a shopping bag featuring dancing elephants, while rather lovely, makes no sense at all.

"Elephant family are happy with us. Their humming makes us feel happy." Ahh.

These mistranslations were presumably made by humans but translations made by computers tend to fare even worse (although personally I’m quite thankful that there is at least one thing we still do better than computers). The title of this post was originally The Trials and Tribulations of Translation Software, but using freetranslation.com to turn it into German and back again gave it a certain level of melodrama not commonly associated with Germany. Strangely, transliterating it into Korean and back produced almost perfect English.

NPR this morning reported the same kind of issue when trying to using translation software such as Babelfish (which as a side note has to be one of my favorite product names, referencing the hilarious Douglas Adams book, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) and Google Translate. These programs only perform sufficiently when they have enough data to learn from, as they do with English and Chinese. If you were looking to translate something from Urdu to Tagalog you would probably find computers seriously lacking. Philip Resnik, from the University of Maryland, and other linguists are trying to use what is called crowd-sourcing to move towards the perfect translation machine. The Haiti earthquake back in January is an example of this idea in action. A vital source of communication for the Haitians was text messages, but not surprisingly the US soldiers couldn’t read the local Creole language, Kreyol, that the majority of the text messages were sent in. Fortunately thousands of Kreyol speakers around the world were eager to help by translating the text messages online. Each message took about 10 minutes to translate, not as fast as a computer perhaps, but a darned sight more accurate.

We’re a galaxy away from a computer that could compete with one of Adams’ actual babel fish but thankfully while we have the spirit of human kindness and the internet, we can do some good. In the meantime we will just have to learn to enjoy following such instructions as this one that Bryson gives us from Tokyo.

"When a passenger of the foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet at him melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage, then tootle him with vigor."

I personally think that ‘tootling with vigor’ sounds like a lot of fun.