FunnyTranslator.com demonstrates the weaknesses of machine translations by translating phrases back and forth 56 times, and showing readers each step along the way. “Will you translate this?” becomes “Payment?” “To be or not to be, that is the question” becomes “Ask.” Apparently there’s still a need for human translators.[%comments]
The Battle of the Translators: Man vs. Machine
TAGS: language, Technology
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Translation Party (http://translationparty.com) does something similar: it translates back and forth between English and Japanese, seeking equilibrium. Although restricted only to 2 languages, the results are no less hilarious.
Why am I underwhelmed by the foibles of translations? This seems expected in a field as complex as utterances of the human brain.
But take heart, all tasks that can be stated as algorithms can now more easily be done by computer.
Some cultures have tries to structure their languages along rigid guidelines. But people don’t pay much attention to the rules.
Thank God the French don’t have any word for entrepreneur.
A fair comparison to reality would be to involve 56 professional translators in a similar study.
I love google voice’s voice to text feature but it has a hard time translating most everyone who calls. What I do find interesting is that it does a really remarkable job when I get calls from anyone with an indian accent. Similarly the Nintendo Brain Age game always had a problem understanding the word “blue.” Many people suggested saying it as “brew” and sure enough, that worked every time.
I wonder if these cultural biases that exist in speech to text programming (and so many other things in life) also exist in language translation.
I always found it interesting when we would have to do translations in my upper level spanish classes how many different results there were. So if 15 students working on their Spanish major can’t come up with the same Spanish to English translation, I’m not sure how I can expect a computer to do much better.
I wonder what kind of results you’d get if you took “To be or not to be, that is the question” and had 56 professional translators (preferably ones unfamiliar with Shakespeare) shift the phrase back and forth between languages…
It would be interesting to see how well human translators do at the same task. Fifty six translations seem like an awful lot. I imagine that, at least for some phrases, the human results would also be amusing (kind of like a translation version of the “telephone game”).
Thanks guys for the review. I am excited and humbled by that!
By the way, that tool is multilingual. If you paste the text in any other language other than English, it will produce the funny mistranslation back in the same language!
Eric, are you trying to be ironic/sarcastic?
BTW, Dubya didn’t say that (though he is dumb).