After my initial enthusiasm last week about Google’s new translation tool, I decided to ask a few people to check how well this translator works in their languages. I was able to investigate 14 different translations — and the results do not look that good.
Perhaps Google’s translator is better than, say, Altavista’s Babelfish — but in most cases the translations are, I think, not really usable.
For languages which I do not speak, I got help from my blog’s readers. Most of the translations into English I checked myself.
Translating Chinese into English works reasonably well, but the other way around is a disaster, for reasons mentioned here. Chinese has too many homonyms and Google appears to get only 50 percent right — and you have to guess which 50 percent.
The only good score in both directions is for Russian-English translations. Other languages do poorly.
Here is some feedback I got from people on this tool.
Philippe said, “You have to guess from the context what it actually is supposed to say.”
I agree — German into English stinks. I concluded this after trying to translate a chapter of my book on China into English.”
Similarly, Joerg Kilian finds Google’s German translations sorely lacking. He used Google to translate into German my English-language posting about Chinese airplanes. Then, he retranslated Google’s version back into English.
Here’s an excerpt of the incoherent results:“Not in the foreseeable future, I think. The condition gremium of China, the highest administrative organ, announced that the country would be ready for a larger commercial area (surface) for at least 150 passengers, raising the reported media. After five decades development things were ready the official newsagency Xinhua reported. If I would be responsible I would let them try something more harmless like movable telephones.”
This demonstrates the general problem with automated translation: You can make sense out of it when you know the original. However, that defies the need to use a translation tool.
Mariab says of Google’s English-to-Italian translation: “The translation of your blog in Italian is quite inaccurate, actually in some parts is not really understandable. I think it works only for simple phrases with a quite linear structure.”
And Juan Pablo Cardenal reports, “Translation into Spanish is not good. Very confusing.”
My advice: Do not use this or any automated translator when an accurate translation is important. The risk of misunderstandings is just too huge.
This reminds me of several situations where translators were not too sure about their own skills and just prayed nobody from the delegations they were helping spoke both languages. Human translators are very good in holding up appearances. This is partly psychological: You want others to understand you, so you all-too-easily assume that they do.
