Saturday, April 30, 2005
Caveat Translator
Darrin Matter makes this confession in the latest Chimes about a recent Spanish assignment:
This was a tough reading. ... Half of the words were ones we’d never seen before, and contrary to what our professor would say, understanding all of them was essential to understanding the story. Needless to say, I needed some help … an online Spanish translator.
Now, you can call me a cheater, and I would be if I had just typed the whole passage into the translator and clicked the translate button. However, I used it like a dictionary instead, typing in words or phrases that I didn’t understand one at a time as I came across them. Frankly, it was much faster and more efficient than using el diccionario. And even though some professors might frown on my “laziness” for doing such a thing, the fact still rests that by doing so, I probably learned more about the Spanish language from that reading that any other student in my class.
But Darrin doesn’t say which site he used, which leaves a major question mark about the quality of the answers he received. BabelFish and Google’s Translate Tool are highly unreliable—especially in their apparent oblivion to case, person, and tense—not to mention idiom. I’ve had some better luck with this tool at freedict.com, but the rule remains: caveat translator.
Update: From the Stanford Daily:
Current machine translations are inconsistent at best, Och said. One current translation program translated “The White House confirmed the existence of a new bin Laden tape” in Arabic to “Alpine white new presence tape registered for coffee confirms Laden,” in English.