'Circumcise Filipinos'
read the welcome banner greeting some Filipino businessmen on a visit to the United States
Of course it should have said 'Welcome Filipinos' (Linguist Online). We are not sure if a computer translation is to blame, but would you trust important communications to a machine? See our list of classic bloopers.
For time immemorial translators and interpreters have enabled the enrichment of life, making international understanding possible, facilitating diplomatic negotiations, making trade happen between countries, writing dictionaries, enabling cooperation to achieve technological and scientific advances, helping the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games become "the best Games ever", and now translators are bringing some 92% of the world's population who are non-English speakers into the fold as they facilitate the localisation (translation) of the world wide web, which up to the present has been dominated by English.
One of the technologies promoted on some web sites is machine (computer) translation, and with it predictions that human translators will become obsolete some time in the next 5 to 100 years. Don't tear up our business card just yet! In addition to the grammatical and semantic complexities of language, communication is heavily reliant on context and intonation, on body language and cultural underpinnings - you can't program this into a computer until it gets a human brain.
An article from The Atlantic Monthly Lost in Translation explores the quality of some of the computer programs available to automatically translate between English and a number of other languages; while some programs are available for less than $100 others are free on web sites such as Babel Fish on Alta Vista. "Most translations fell somewhere between impressive and nonsensical" writes Stephen Budiansky in the above article. "Language is extremely complex, for example, a Sheffield University researcher determined that there are 18,000 rules in English grammar and machine translation systems that incorporate grammatical rules to decipher how words function in sentences (parsing sentences) means the number of permutations is beyond the capacity of any computer to handle." Budiansky concludes that "despite all the wizardry of grammatical permutations and probability calculations utilised by the major machine translation systems, computers do not have common sense. Language is full of ambiguity and multiple meanings that only context can fill in."
While the accuracy rate using machine translation for some European languages reaches 65% or more, character based languages present additional complications in sheer volume of characters, grammar, word order, idioms, etc; translators spend more time correcting a computer-generated translation than doing it from scratch. If you only require the basic gist of a communication to be translated, it is worth a try, for most business applications, however, it will be safest and most expedient to use a professionally qualified and experienced translator, such as that provided by Australia's system of accreditation through NAATI (National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters). Machine translation works well in narrow, specialised areas where there is no semantic ambiguity. For example, Canadian radio stations translate frequent weather bulletins from English to French. This is successful because they use a lexicon of a few hundred words only.
Chinese Language also has its own unique qualities that will make the transition between Chinese and English, or vice versa, even more riddled with errors, for example: no pluralisation, no tense or gender, no subject-verb agreement, use of classifiers (for nouns), existence of many particles or grammatical words which provide - for example - a time aspect (tense), when compared to English.
Chin Communications, a specialist Chinese translation company, is involved in more and more web and software localisation projects, in addition to the normal business, government, legal, and community assignments, sharing in the estimated $5 billion web market. Human translation itself is estimated at US$8 billion per year.
Translators have been early adapters to on line and computer tools - indeed for character-based languages like Chinese this has been especially challenging; however with character support (such as Microsoft has), or Portable Document Format (Adobe Acrobat), the absence of specialised Chinese software is no longer a barrier; we also source on-line databases, dictionaries, editing tools, and subscribe to email lists and the like to keep abreast of technological developments and contribute shared knowledge. Computer assistance is now available to assist our failing memories and to aid standardisation of terminology. Translation Memory, in simple terms, is a database system storing target and source language segments which will prove useful for repetitive translations such as technical manuals, scientific articles, patents and for documents that are frequently revised.
Interpreters and Translators Love Language -more information about how to achieve a quality translation. What is the difference between an interpreter and translator? As a specialist Chinese translation and interpreting company, Chin Communications presents some useful information about how to work with translators and interpreters.
Understanding Interpreting - many questions answered.
Name Games including how to translate a business card looks at the Chinese naming system and how westerners should go about translating their names into Chinese.
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