The best use of machine translation
Many people are by now aware of machine translation. Google Translate has made it so easy to see an instant web site translation in your own language. The results are remarkably good, but anyone who has used it will see that machine translated texts contain simple errors, like adding or missing out “the”, or major errors like putting parts of the translated sentence in the wrong order. The further the language is from your own language, i.e. Chinese to English, the worse it seems to be.
Google Toolbar
It’s easy to see this by going to a web site in another language and using Google translate, or another tool like Babelfish to translate a page into English. Better still, take a piece of text in English, translate it into another language using say Google Translate, and translate it back with Google Translate or another tool, and see what the differences are. Even between European languages, the meaning can be lost entirely.
Here’s one example, a line from a newspaper report today. “The risk is roughly one in seven that Europe’s ongoing debt crisis will push member nations to abandon the shared currency”
Translated into French by Babelfish : “Le risque est approximativement un dans sept qui Europe’ ; la crise continue de dette de s poussera des pays membres pour abandonner la devise partagée
Translated back into English by Google Translate “The risk is approximately one in seven that Europe ‘, the debt crisis continues to grow s member countries to abandon the currency shared”
Using Google only to translate back and forth actually got a much better result, but still with one error : “Le risque est à peu près un sur sept que la crise de l’Europe continue de la dette va pousser les pays membres à abandonner la monnaie commune.” This became : “The risk is about one in seven that the crisis of Europe continued debt will push member states to abandon the common currency”
It’s clear that machine translation is not good enough for marketing communications. If you are trying to put over the benefits of your product or engage people on a web site your copy needs to be right. Poorly translated material just adds to the overhead in understanding that your audience has to deal with. Every potential customer has a point at which the amount of interest they have in reading about you or your company is overtaken by the difficulty they have in finding or understanding the information they are looking for.
Machine translation is great for research to get the gist of what something is about. It is an effective tool that just wasn’t available to international businesses a few years ago. However there’s a danger in this because it is written communication. Care needs to be taken that a machine translation is not used as precise translation of meaning.
If you want to use machine translation to communicate in other languages it helps to make your English as simple as possible. Avoid jargon, colloquial langauge and references which only people in your country will understand – they are bound to make the translation worse than it needs to be.
Lastly, Google has just announced a deal with the European Patent Office (EPO) to use Google Translate to translate patents in 28 languages. See this by Lawdit, the e-commerce law solicitors. Google will benefit by learning more about translating patents and the EPO will benefit by having searchable patents available in all these languages. It raises questions as to how keyphrases will be translated because as we know from multilingual SEO techniques, people use search terms that are not necessarily direct translations. This will affect the quality of the search. No doubt Google will put something in place to overcome this issue and will learn a lot about how people typically search for patents online in multiple languages.
