Being multilingual, I have found Google Translate to be quite handy at times; particularly in the recent year while struggling with the task of improving the capability in mastering the Danish language. An otherwise dreadful task of constantly seeking out the proper usage of the letters "æ", "ø" and "å" has become rather swift- all because of the translation mechanism. Needless to say that "When in doubt, let Google Translate figure it out" became my main motto when I moved to Denmark.
It made all the sense in the world to import the nifty little gadget as I envisioned the convenience it would bring to future readers of the blog who may only speak English as a second language. The fact that it has been my previous experience, while using Google Translate, that an input sentence of high quality (as opposed to a colloquial sentence composition) in the original language produces a more correct output sentence in the desired language, would add to my belief that that my blog would translate into meaningful content in any language as long as I kept the original language at a level equal to that of professional writing.
Because there hasn't been a need to translate long passages of text by the help of Google Translate , I had no idea what a translation consisting of more than two sentences would look like. A golden opportunity to find out exactly how extensive text would transform into any of the languages offered by Google had presented itself- and that opportunity was right now and it was right here on my very own blog. It was time to give it a try. I had a shiny new techie button which would allow translation of all the content in less than twenty seconds (yes- I counted)...exciting, indeed!
Naturally, I chose the content to be translated into Danish. Waiting eagerly to review the final result, I was thinking about the marvels of modern technology and how such technology had led us to the convenience of leaving the task of translation to machines.
3-2-1 and voila-my blog was suddenly transformed into Danish...at least, so I thought.
As I began to read, I realized that I was witness to the most horrifying translation I had ever seen. The more I read, the more difficult it became not to feel insulted by the poor outcome. So I translated the site again with a hope that some kind of glitch may have caused the translation to fail. A few seconds later I was staring at the same awful translation. Well, if it wasn't a glitch then perhaps it was the selected language which may not have reached the optimal level of quality in the Google world of translation . So I decided to translate it once again, but opted to translate the content into Norwegian.
"Oh, holy green guacamole!" The translator had spit up rather than spit out a language resembling gibberish from the land of make-believe; it was like reading an ongoing ramble written by an individual challenged by self-inflicted incoherence.
The best way to explain the absolute failure is by example: While translating the text from English to Norwegian, by the way of Google Translate, the sentence "The right hemisphere of the brain" produced this sentence in Norwegian: "Rett halvkulen av hjernen". The newly produced Norwegian sentence would look like this: "The correct half bullet of the brain", if it was translated back to English. Now, by comparing the two English sentences there is no comparison, as the translation machine distorted the sentence to such an extent that it has no real meaning.
In June of this year, The Economist, ran the article "Machine Translation- Babel or babble". Johnson (2012) writes about the book "The Last Lingua Franca", written by Nicholas Ostler. Herein, Ostler claims (and Johnson appears to agree) that translation machines will be able to cover the need for all translation of text in the nearest future, thereby making human translation a thing of the past.
Read the article here:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2012/06/machine-translation
After the awful experience of watching the Google Translate gadget destroy my word composition in the worst possible way ever, I can only disagree with the claims presented in the article. If anything, the article strengthened my belief that the art of translation is still a matter for humans aided by machines and should never become the other way around.
While glancing at the example once again, it is worth noticing that although Google translated the sentence correctly verbatim, it lacks the necessary capability of choosing the proper word out of a selection of words spelled the same but differ by definition, thereby proving that the selection process of correct words which give meaning to text in a translation is an ability unique to the human brain. For instance, the English word for "right" can be defined many ways. The word can also be defined several ways in Norwegian. If the word stood alone, it could very well be translated to "correct" just as the technology decided to do. But, knowing the meaning of the overall sentence we understand that "right" in this case refers to location rather than a level of accuracy. Again, the example provides a valid fact that machines made by man will not always be able to replace the best machine of man himself, thus providing a safe-haven for present and future linguists.
Despite the agony caused by the Google translation gone bad to worse, I have decided that the Google Translate gadget will remain on the blog. After all, the peculiar translations may just, if nothing else, provide the reader with a good laugh...
T.G.D
PS! Yes- Women do care, read, discuss, and blog about technology.
