Machine Translation - How Bad Is It?
Mar 5th, 2008 by Charles
To a certain extent, it’s quite amazing that a piece of software can take a piece of text and magically translate it into any languages. Website owners often wonder how accurate those free tools are and if they should use it on their websites. Unfortunately, the result is often dismal. Being native in French, and fairly at ease with Spanish, I always notice a website that has been translated using a free machine translation tool, and it is not pretty.
Now, being that I represent a human translation agency, I’m probably not exactly objective when it comes to machine translation. So, instead of taking my word for it, let’s take a look at a simple example.
Take the below short four sentences paragraph, which I wrote in French, and then translated myself (literally) in English:
Bob travaille pour une petite entreprise au centre-ville. Le travail de Bob consiste dans la réparation d’ordinateurs et l’installation de nouveaux logiciels. Durant ses temps libres, il aime lire, regarder des films et jouer au poker avec ses amis. Bob a 30 ans et vit dans une grande maison avec sa femme et ses enfants.
Bob works for a small company downtown. Bob’s job consists of repairing computers and installing new software. In his spare time, he likes to read, watch movies and play poker with his friends. Bob is 30 years old and lives in a big house with his wife and kids.
Now, I used one of the popular free translation software to translate the same French text. I got the following result:
Bobsled works for a small business to the center city. The work of Bobsled consists in the repair of computers and the installation again software. During its free time, it likes to read, look at films and to play poker with its friends. Bobsled is 30 years old and lives in a big house with his woman and its children.
Four sentences, and already we can spot at least 10 significant mistakes. And don’t ask me why Bob gets translated in Bobsled!
So, let’s take it further. Since many use free machine translation to offer their pages in other languages, let’s try to get a better idea of what get shown to their foreign visitors.
I took the human translated English text and used the machine translation to translate it in French and then retranslate it in English. Here is the result:
Bobsled works for a small company in city. The bobsled work consists in to repair computers and installing again software. In its leisures, it likes to read, look at poker of films and piece with its friends. Bobsled is 30 years old and lives in a big house with his woman and its childlike ones.
Obviously, here, there’s the double effect of the machine translation – but, truth is, machine translation is even worst when translating from English into another language than the other way around. Publishing copy like the one above is like slapping your readers in the face!
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I just tried translating the French paragraph using Google Translate and the results are amazing:
“Bob works for a small business in downtown. Bob’s work consists of repairing computers and installing new software. During his spare time he likes to read, watch movies and playing poker with his friends. Bob was 30 years old and lives in a large house with his wife and children.”
There are a few minor mistakes “playing poker” instead of “play poker”, “a small business in downtown” instead of “a small business downtown”. and “was 30 years old” instead of “is 30 years old” which can be corrected in a couple seconds. I don’t speak French but could quickly correct these errors. If you compare to the human translation, even the human translation has a mistake - “consists in” instead of “consists of” and I’m sure it took much longer.
worldbeing - Thanks for dropping by, (and thanks for spotting that mistake (mine) in the Human English version)! I’ve never tried Google Translate, but from your result, I must admit that it’s more accurate than the other machine translation tool I used in my example.
However, in your example, you used the tool to translate into a language you know. There’s a problem when webmasters use these tools to offer their website in other languages (that they don’t speak). Had you translated this paragraph into Russian for example, assuming you don’t speak Russian, you never would have been able to spot the few minor mistakes nor correct them in a couple of seconds. Now, imagine a complete website, filled with minor mistakes. In addition, the text in this example is as simple as it gets, so a few mistakes is probably a best case scenario.
–Charles