Lost in translation

Dans nos perambulations par le Cyberspace, la plupart d'entre nous raison de trouvaille de temps en temps à la ressource à Babelfish (ou sites Web semblables) pour des traductions des expressions curieuses de langue étrangère que nous rencontrons.

In our perambulations through cyberspace, most of us find reason occasionally to resort to Babel Fish (or similar web sites) for translations of curious foreign language phrases that we encounter. The tool of automatic translation at first seems awesome, but after several uses we learn its limitations.

For example: The sentence in italics at the top of this post is Babel Fish's translation to French of my first sentence in English. Using Babel Fish again, this time to to re-translate from French back to English, gives us the following example of deathless English prose:

In our perambulations by the Cyberspace, the majority d' between us reason of lucky find from time to time to the resource with Babelfish (or similar Web sites) for translations of the expressions curious about foreign language which we meet.

If you squint your eyes and pretend you're listening to a polite Frenchman trying to speak our language, you can sort of get the gist of what's being said. But ze translation is not, how you say, absolument parfaite, n'est-ce pas?

Therefore, we have to sympathize with La Tribune, a French language business newspaper, in its recent efforts to publish a simultaneous English language, on-line edition, using automatic translation -- rather than relying on a competent human translator.

Ryanair loan to make travel

of the passengers upright

So read a recent headline, making even more absurd Ryanair's plans to sell "standing room only" space on its European flights. The story continues:

Ryanair plays the provocation once more. After the paying toilets, ones surtaxes for the largest passengers, Ryanair would plan to make travel part of its passengers upright!

La Tribune recognizes that its translations to date could be clearer, that they perhaps lack a certain je ne sais quoi. Therefore, the newspaper is hiring a human translator to review and "tweak" the computer-generated translations before they are published, to ensure greater clarity. The writer of the Agence France-Presse article who reported La Tribune's experiment found most of the translations to be -- "with a little effort" -- understandable, despite their "linguistic oddities."

It's easy to laugh at La Tribune's quirky translations, just as it was easy at one time to laugh at the English language instructions that came with Japanese consumer goods -- and we all know who ended up winning that battle. Automatic translation is still in its infancy, but -- as the publishers of La Tribune well know -- the technology even now produces a serviceable, if not elegant, translation at a fraction of the cost of hiring human translators. Computer memory is cheap, and bit by bit the various differences in word order between languages, their unique idioms, the multiple shades of meaning they assign to various words and phrases, and even the nuances of tone for various levels of formality in speech will be noted, remembered and applied.

Prediction: Automatic translations will be nearly indistinguishable from human translations within ten years. La Tribune will have been there first, and will have the last laugh.