Translation: Beware Of The Machines

In the world today, with this wonder of technology, always renewing itself, it seems that everything depends on it, is hard to think of jobs a machine can not reach to at least almost as well as a human being. Try it and see for, or get yourself an application for your smartphone that does it for you.

Unfortunately for many, the miraculous machine cartoon Wallace and Gromit, which wakes you up, I saw, I shower and breakfast prepares you, and I will do everything automatically to the last detail without us lifting a finger, it seems be still going to have to wait a couple of years. While for boxing fans, it sure would be a blow strong enough to see the next round draw robots in miniskirts, instead of the sexy girl that all have been paraded life!

One area in which humans keep winning the battle against the robots is without doubt the translation. Machine translation has existed since the 50's, when it was considered the best solution for thousands of technical articles translated from Russian into English during the Cold War era in the U.S. Surprising that many decades later, despite huge investments in it and support during the development of many of the best linguists in the world, machine translation is still far from its original purpose.

Why? Well, according to Alan K. Melby (in his famous article Why translate a computer does not know as a person?) "The translation is difficult, even for people." Basically what it says is that the languages ​​are very difficult. The mere concept of "language" is quite complicated. This phenomenon is living, breathing - a variety of nuances, inflections, multiple meanings, expressions and idiosyncrasies that are constantly evolving, always escapes you, you can never understand one hundred percent. And as if it were not already complicated enough, this can be added to the grammar rules, and perhaps even worse, derogations from the rules. And do not forget the differences in structure between different languages, and specifically the word order changes from one language to another, probably the biggest cause of headaches for developers of machine translation programs.



In addition, unlike humans - or at least most of them - computers (or computers, we see here a major difference) do not live in the real world. Just read the opinion of Stephen Budiansky (http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/98dec/computer.htm) to know that computers do not have common sense. At the time when factors difficult to define as tone of voice, mood, context and cultural environments begin to act, computers (and even humans, sometimes), they tend to hang.



Considering the sensitive nature of the mixture of all the factors mentioned above, it is difficult to understand that the end result can be disastrous, and often is. On the other hand, sometimes there are some comic gems, depends on our point of view. Consider the automatic translation of some phrases from Castilian to English and then translated from English back to their original language with Babelfish tool. As we can see, the results are quite entertaining.

A curious compliment which once used a friend of mine, for example, "Would you like to eat an apple with me on Wednesday?" resulted in something even rarer: "Did you Become an apple with me on Wednesday to eat?" ("You turned me on Wednesday in apple to eat?"). The old saying "Football is a game of two halves" becomes "football is a play of two halves" ("Football is a performance of two halves"), which, considering some classics in recent weeks, perhaps expressed another truth, too.

All work done by the brains behind the machine translation software does not seem to give great results. Fees accuracy of the programs can vary greatly from one to another, depending on the entered text, but still are far from achieving the undoubted quality of a translation done by a professional translator. Yes it is true that the machines can be very useful when translators use them to quickly produce a draft and then revise it consciously, a way of working that can improve to some extent the efficiency of human translators. However, for those new to the world of translation, the advice is be very careful. The translation between different languages ​​best left to professionals - if you do not know what he is doing could be compromised. Literally.