Google Translate and book reviews

[Eric]

I've mentioned Google Translate before in various contexts. The service means you can look at an article in a language you don't know when browsing on the internet, and it will translate it for you, after a fashion. I have a Google toolbar on my browser set-up, and so if I find an article which I can only read with great difficulty, I can get the gist of it by pressing the link on the toolbar. Google Translate will, of course, also translate into other languages than English, and out of quite a few.

The problem is that it very much depends on the language and its syntax whether the translation you get is sense or nonsense. With a Portuguese article that I looked at yesterday, simply a review of a book, the machine (for it is a machine) did quite well. However, with Finnish, a language with particularly convoluted syntax from the point of view of an English-speaker, the machine tends to turn Finnish sentences into complete gobbledegook.

But I cannot deny that it helped me with the Portuguese article. Have any of you actually tried using it, and what were the results?

[Galatea92]

Yes, I use it quite a bit. I can write French, but not fast enough to keep up with an email correspondence. So I use Google translate to write emails, and double-check before I send to make sure the email isn't garbage. (I make it clear I'm using Google translate to do the job, so they don't ring me up expecting me to speak fluent French :-).

I once tried it out with a Swedish colleague, and he was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the Swedish produced. (I couldn't judge, not knowing any Swedish at all).

Have you used the Google Translate page, where you enter in text on one side and it translates for you on the other side? It's fascinating to watch it change the translation as you type. It's obviously not a word-for-word translator; it's got some clever semantic processor that takes context into account. It also asks for suggestions for improving the translation, so maybe you could help the Finnish translator out. (Or maybe not. We don't want to give Google all our knowledge, do we :-().

[Eric]

Yes, I've used the split page thing which then comes up automatically on the other side. The test there is then to keep doing this back and forth via several languages, and the, as with Chinese whispers, you tend to get a version quite a long way from the original.

So, I'm starting out with this from today's papers:

London 2012 Olympics: David Cameron says too many top British athletes went to public school. Too many of Britain’s top athletes were educated at public schools, David Cameron has said. Public school educated athletes who are set to appear in the Olympics include sailor Ben Ainslie, who attended Truro School in Cornwall and cyclist Sir Chris Hoy, who attended George Watson’s College in Edinburgh.

The key test is the word "public". Most geeks are Yanks and we Brits know, "public school" in the USA is not the same thing as "public school" in the UK. But robots don't think. So I had the machine translate the text into Swedish, then the Swedish into Dutch.

And of course, because of the "public" confusion, the Swedish, then the Dutch versions turned what is intrinsically a private school into a state one, as we say in English.

[Eric]

Via Finnish, Dutch, Polish, then Catalan, then English again, you get:

London Olympics 2012: David Cameron says there aquestes dates Dalt britànics Many athletes Went to l'Escola Public. Aquests Many players were Britain millor educated and Public schools, David Cameron, said. Public Escola Moors athletes set to occur at the Olympic games are the sailor Ben Ainslie, donat participated in the Truro School sense cyclist Sir Chris Avui, tumors present era la Universitat de George Watson a Edimburg.

This teaches you that if the particular language programme is not sufficiently developed, words will be left that then get carried over.