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, even human translation, is a lossy process. That means that is it often not possible to translate an expression with 100% accuracy from one language to another. While we’re at it, putting thoughts into words is also a lossy process, and can often lead to misunderstandings, without crossing any language barrier. Many words have more than one meaning, sometimes ambiguous even with context. The same can be said of syntactic structures.
Between two languages, it’s common to find an instance of a perfectly precise expression in one language that will have more than one (imperfect) match in the second language. Now back to the first, and you’ve already lost some precision.
A bit of mathematics now. Assume for each and every translation, we have the same probability of getting the right translation, say 98% (which is really high for automatic tools), then it takes 35 steps to come to less than 50% accuracy. Now take into account that for most of the language pairs in those samples, accuracy is most likely much worse than the 98% we used. It might never ever attain this level, even for human translation.
To be really fair in the comparison, we should put human translators to the same task, each one unaware of the game being played. I’d be surprised if we got great results, for anything more complex than trivial words or well known sentences (like ‘To be or not to be’). Most likely, we’d get something funny in the end, like in a game of broken telephone.
Of course, this would be way to hard and costly to organize, and tricks like FunnyTranslator are only possible because automatic translation is cheap and rapid.
Now, it’s not really a proof for anything. Multiple back-and-forth translations are hardly a credible use case. Since most people are not close to master their own language’s subtleties, let alone know and speak two different languages, we should probably be grateful for the relative quality of free and rapid automatic tools. For their usual job of doing only one translation, and the result being used to understand a text rather than blind copying for print (I might be wrong on that though), automatic translation tools are still useful, and often, good enough.
A great part of the machine translation problem has to do with the fact that words are often misspelled, the subjunctive mood is abused, “due to” is misused, and political correctness requires abortions like “everybody needs to bring their own towel,” and so on ad nauseam.
Indeed, I find it much easier to converse with a machine than to endure listening to a product of our public school system or, god forbid, read something he has written.
Is there a similar website for translating Sarah Palins verse?
Its not a translation thats important but interpretation.
Knowing the language AND culture is whats important in communication.
And the nuances therin.
Machine translation has taken great strides over the past two decades, and translation-memory (TM) software has also improved considerably, but the human factor in translation and interpreting are still so vital that it’s hard to imagine a world without them.
One of my favorite examples from English is the verb “to get”, which when coupled with prepositions (i.e. get up, get out, get over, get by, etc) can be translated into dozens and dozens of verbs in other languages. Add in to that potential potential nouns (a get-up) and you’ve got a programmer’s nightmare.
TM software is a big help to those of us in the industry (disclosure: I’m a professional translator), but for the foreseeable future, I don’t think that we’re in any danger of losing our jobs.
John,
do you think you could have announced to the world that you are a professional translator without making it sound like TM is a sort of MT? TM tools, in essence, can’t replace translators any more than Photoshop can replace designers. MT is a different story.
Nor does the problem have anything to do with getting computers to check whether there is a preposition after a verb and adjust translation accordingly.
What’s that old Italian saying? “Traduttore, traditore” … which is supposed to mean “Translator, traitor”. In other words (no pun intended, given the topic), those who make translations inherently lose a part of what is being translated during the process, “betraying” the original message.
I can only imagine what the Italians would say about 56 computerized translations…*
*: this was translated into
“In addition, Italy, in 1956 the group who can not think of anything to sell, ‘he said.’ “
Ever heard of the game “telephone?” Obviously humans have similar issues.