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chinaherald.net
The author's blog China Herald, translated into Chinese via Google Language Tools. |
In December
I made fun of Altavista's automated online translation service
Babelfish -- to the relief of a few friends who make a living in translating. I thought it would take another year before I would give such a service a serious chance.
But today I got an enthusiastic email from my colleague Maria Trombly, who advised me to look at Google's new Language Tools online translation service.
I just tried this on my own blog, China Herald, which I publish in English. The picture above shows Google's Chinese translation of my blog. Compared to Babelfish, Google's translations actually make some sense.
However, I must agree with Maria: Google's Chinese translations read like a Xinhua news report.
That is not necessarily a compliment, since the state news agency in China is known for its often unintelligent usage of English. The problem is of course, that when the original does not make any sense in your eyes, the translation is also a problem.
My Chinese colleagues report that Google's English-to-Chinese translations are about 60 percent correct -- not an encouraging score, although it is better than Babelfish's estimated 10 percent accuracy.
The problem is that Chinese has many homonyms, and translation software usually picks the most commonly used characters, which are not always correct. Also, translation software often does not know where to end or where to begin a Chinese sentence.
This might be an interesting experiment: Google's translator allows you to suggest corrections. When people start doing so, its English-to-Chinese accuracy might improve over time.
At this stage, this system doesn't save time for people who speak both English and Chinese well. However, for people who only speak one of those languages, there is a fair chance that you won't get the right message.
Much to say about those subjects, Marlow. too much for...
