Lady Hawkins - the book

Online translation: the good, the bad, and the ugly

Language is a complex tool, and if we’ve ever gone through the process of learning another, we’ll be well aware of the pitfalls of online translation improperly, or fail at constructing sentences because automated translations often ignore critical syntax and phrase things and, The internet has become a major communications system engulfing all aspects of commerce, government, education, information, healthcare, and other arenas which ofcourse includes translation process , and by taking a quick look at these automated translation engines we can conclude its disadvantages .

The late 1990s saw the advent of free online machine translators such as Babelfish and Transtext, Now we have a beast of a different kind. Google Translate is a statistical machine translation system, which means that it doesn’t try to unpick or understand anything, Instead of taking a sentence to pieces and then rebuilding it in the “target” tongue as the older machine translators do, Google Translate looks for similar sentences in already translated texts somewhere out there on the Web, Having found the most likely existing match through an incredibly clever and speedy statistical reckoning device, Google Translate coughs it up, raw or, if necessary, lightly cooked, That’s how it simulates, but only simulates, what we suppose goes on in a translator’s head, Google Translate, which can so far handle 52 languages, sidesteps the linguists’ theoretical question of what language is and how it works in the human brain. In practice, languages are used to say the same things over and over again, For maybe 95 percent of all utterances, Google’s electronic magpie is a fabulous tool. But there are two important limitations that users of this or any other statistical machine translation system need to understand, The target sentence supplied by Google Translate is not and must never be mistaken for the “correct translation.” That’s not just because no such thing as a “correct translation” really exists. It’s also because Google Translate gives only an expression consisting of the most probable equivalent phrases as computed by its analysis of an astronomically large set of paired sentences trawled from the Web, The data comes in large part from the documentation of international organizations,Thousands of human translators working for the United Nations and the European Union and so forth have spent millions of hours producing precisely those pairings that Google Translate is now able to cherry-pick, The human translations have to come first for Google Translate to have anything to work with, The variable quality of Google Translate in the different language pairings available is due in large part to the disparity in the quantities of human-engineered translations between those languages on the Web , But what of real writing? Google Translate can work apparent miracles because it has access to the world library of Google Books, That’s presumably why, when asked to translate a phrase from a novel ,it comes up with a very creditable result, which just happens to be identical to the published translations of that phrase, It’s an impressive trick for a computer, but for a human? All you need to do is get the old paperback from your basement, Google Translate ever be of any use for the creation of new literary translations into English or another language, The first thing to say is that there really is no need for it to do that, But even if the need were there, Google Translate could not do anything useful in this domain, It is not conceived or programmed to take into account the purpose, real-world context or style of any utterance, Any system able to do that would be a truly epochal achievement, but such a miracle is not on the agenda of even the most advanced machine translation developers, However, to play devil’s advocate for a moment, if you were to take a decidedly jaundiced view of some genre of contemporary foreign fiction, you could surmise that since such works have nothing new to say and employ only repeated formulas, then after a sufficient number of translated novels of that kind and their originals had been scanned and put up on the Web, Google Translate should be able to do a pretty good simulation of translating other regurgitations of the same ilk.

Google Translate can provide stupendous services in many domains, but it is not set up to interpret or make readable work that is not routine, and it is unfair to ask it to try. After all, when it comes to the real challenges of literary translation, human beings have a hard time of it .