Jan
10
Tarzan Spanish: The perils of automated translation
I recently saw a question someone posted in a Spanish-learning forum about online translation tools. The writer was concerned that she was becoming too dependent on automated translation and was wondering if maybe it was causing more harm than good. I’ve written about this topic before on this blog but the subject of automated translation is a gift that keeps on giving. It bears repeating: Use automated translation tools at your own peril. Public Enemy Número Uno is Google which, despite its search-engine prowess, does godawful translation.
Don’t believe me? Check out these delightful gems that Google Translate conjured up when I put in the following random English sentences. All of Google’s Spanish translations are duds and are copy and pasted exactly as they appeared in my web browser. I didn’t change a single thing.
Sentences 1 and 2: “I like to fish in the ocean. I fish in the ocean.” Google says: Me gusta el pescado en el oceáno. Yo pescado en el oceáno.
Sentence 3: “I wish I were rich.” Google wrote: Deseo que eran ricos. [The use of the verb desear sounds odd in this context. I would've gone with an ojalá phrase instead of using desear. But even overlooking the use of desear, the mistake in this translation is HUGE. The Spanish sentence requires the use of the imperfect subjunctive in the subordinate clause and the verb ser should be conjugated in the first-person singular, not the third-person plural.]
Sentence 4: “He didn’t go and neither did I.” Google translation: No ir y tampoco I. This is not real Spanish. This is Tarzan Spanish. [Cue sounds of bongo drums beating and chimpanzees screeching.]
Sentence 5: “The Jets fired their coach hours after the team was eliminated from the playoffs.” Google says: Los Jets disparó su entrenador horas después de que el equipo fue eliminado de los playoffs. (In English the Jets coach gets fired from his job while in the Spanish translation he gets taken out and shot by his team! )
If you are a heavy user of automated translation tools you may be unknowingly hardwiring incorrect vocab and grammar structures into your memory. That will slow your progress and make it harder for you, down the road, to advance your Spanish since you will be forced to unlearn aspects of the language that you thought you already knew. Not a good situation to be in, especially if you’ve been studying Spanish for a few years.
Don’t kid yourself into thinking that automated translation will help your Spanish. If you’re in a pinch, yeah, I guess you can use automated online tools to get a general idea, more or less, of what the sentence means, but always check and verify with a better source. Visit the human powered Spanish-English forum over at WordReference.com whenever you need to verify the accuracy of your translations.
So long, so long and thanks for all the fish! or, in the words of Google, Tanto tiempo, tanto tiempo y gracias por todos los peces!
Photo: “Modern Technology” by Josh Blake, used under license from iStockPhoto.com
For anyone still not convinced I’d suggest trying out the old experiment of picking a random piece of text, using an online translator to convert it into Spanish, say, and then use the translator again to convert it back into English. Did you get what you started off with?
For even *better* (read: more humorous) results, successively translate your text into a few different languages along the way before getting back to English.
I agree. Machine translations are almost always atrocious and unintelligible. Electronic dictionaries, however, are getting better and better. Wordreference.com is great and the good ol’ http://www.rae.es is fabulous as a monolingual Spanish dictionary.
Yes, we all know that automatic translators cannot compare to professional translators, but they do have a place and can be very useful given the right context and specialization.
Also, it’s funny when people mention this “experiment” to take a sentence, translate it into Spanish and then translate it back into English using an automatic translator. I did this same experiment using human translators and while the final result wasn’t as bad as the automatic translator, there was a considerable difference between the original text and the final result. So don’t hate on automatic translators too much.
@Clint – Just out of interest, a) how proficient were the human translators?, and b) was the ‘considerable difference’ in the essential underlying meaning of the text, or merely in the words used to convey it?
I read somewhere that Google Translate is based on a statistical analysis of documents. Obviously if they haven’t analyzed enough source documents to help the system translate from English to Spanish, Spanish to English, it’s not surprising that these kinds of “fishy” mistakes [to fish = pescado] pop up so frequently.
Google is so on target and intuitive with its other services [search engine, Gmail, Adsense, etc.] that it’s kind of embarrassing to see them offer a product like Google Translate that is, at best, mediocre.
I knew a person who had an internet love affair with a girl who sent him perfect machine translations of her letters from her mother language. I told him straight away it was suspicious as she was looking for love in a country, of the language of which she didn’t even have rudimentary knowledge. It turned out to be a fraudster.
Personally, it still helps me to communicate with the clients with whom we do not have any languages in common – at least I translate the text and the little knowledge I have of a couple of other languages and the intuition usually do a decent job and the corrected result is better than putting the client off by forcing him to do the same in English or rather language – he would have to resort to google anyway…
You are so right! I’m a Spaniard and I’ve tried translating some English pages into Spanish… it was horrible- or really funny XD, because you would find sentences with words that made no sense at all in that context.
Thanks everyone for reading and commenting!
@CostaRossa, regarding internet dating, simiiar situation happened to someone I know. First two emails were normal English, probably because they were short and generic, and then the guy’s emails got progressively more stilted and weird sounding. Appeared that the guy knew just enough English to fake it through the initial emails but then had to resort to machine translation and copying and pasting sugary lines of poetry he was finding online. Ick.
Now in mangled Spanish from FreeTranslation.com:
“Con respecto a internet que fecha, situación de simiiar sucedió a alguien yo sé. Primero dos correos electrónicos fueron ingleses normales, probablemente porque ellos fueron cortos y genéricos, y entonces el tipo correos electrónicos sonar conseguido progresivamente más forzado y raro. Parecido que el tipo supo justo que suficiente inglés para falsificarlo por los iniciales correos electrónicos pero entonces tuvo que recurrir traducción automática y copiando y pegando líneas azucaradas de poesía él encontraba en línea. Ick.”
Babelfish English -> Spanish -> English:
In relation to the dating of the Internet, the situation to simiiar somebody happened that I know. The first two email were English normal, probably because they were short and generic, and then guy’ the email of s obtained to the sonar progressively more strange peraltado and. Appeared that the individual knew enough English to falsify it through the email initial but on the other hand it had to resort to the automatic translation and to copy and to stick sweetened lines of poetry that it found in line. Ick
Thanks for writing about this. I’ve had some trouble using those translators and never trust them, though in some situations they’ve been helpful. I love the graphic, BTW!
I gotta be a little contrarian here. Me like Online translators. Me favorite Google.
At least for Spanish to English I find them fantastic. I can always fix the mistakes…and sometimes having a slightly convoluted definition of a word is OK I think ( it’s what we did as kids…you just get more context eventually and fix it.)
I like Google format because you can print out (or cut and paste into word) in a nice Right/Left 2 column format…like a bilingual book. Use “landscape” page orientation.
To paste into word: Table > Insert > Table> columns =2. Then paste each language separately and add spaces here and there, to line up the paragraphs. Fix the English if you want.
Print out and read away! Highlight the unfamiliar words. Then look at the English and try to translate back to Spanish.
I’ve leaned a butt-load of vocabulary this way (and also idioms, which Google seems to better than the more literal others.) Yeah, Tarzan speech is always a danger if you translate to your non-native tongue. But avoiding this tool is like refusing to use a calculator.
Me hate sliderule!
(BTW butt-load is a respectable word…and it doesn’t mean ‘culata de carga”…maybe “carga para tres burros”?)
uh…”learned…not leaned a butt-load” (that WOULD have been rude)…which reminds me of one terrible limit of online translators:
They ken do absolutley nothin with peeps who speel like Tarzan.
(Ken absolutley que hacer nada con peeps que speel como Tarzán)
…see?
Tarzán has an accent?…who knew?
@Icemel: Your comments have substance with a good sense of humor. Me likey!
Re Google format/layout, I’ll agree with you on that point, that their translating template/page is very clean and easy to navigate.
@Ryan: “Machine translations are almost always atrocious and unintelligible.”
Machine translation can give good results. Many companies use machine translation successfully. For an evaluation of machine translation, see http://www.international-english.co.uk/mt-evaluation.html.
@Mike Unwalla,
Thanks for your perspective and for offering an opposing point of view. There’s obviously a huge market for machine translation that is meeting the basic needs for some clients out there. A corporation that needs to translate a manual of instructions into “international English” is more than likely going to get better results than an individual wanting to get the exact nuance of some random statement he heard in a foreign movie or overheard on a bus, for example.
But just to clarify, my intention in writing the original post was to discourage people (who are learning Spanish) from using machine translation as a reliable tool that can improve their Spanish. There are some people who think they can do their Spanish homework by typing their statements in English into Google and voilà! presto, change-o, out comes the homework, totally done, just as if they had put it in a microwave!
Just like how food that is zapped in a microwave often doesn’t taste as good as slow cooked food, students who rely heavily on machine translation shouldn’t expect the results to make them sound like real native speakers. That’s all I was saying.