[Tower of Babel. From Logoi.com]
A while back, my friend David Feng tweeted in Chinese that he was tweeting while riding under Beijing in a subway car.
I used Google Translate to see if I could figure out what he said. It came out something like "I'm using my digits on myself with a bird in the Beijing belly," and he and I had a good laugh
I remembered that this morning I saw a few tweets with my name in them. Two were in Chinese and one in Arabic. I used Google Translate to try to read in English what was written in these two languages that I don't speak.
The results were downright goofy and I have not a clue what had been written about me. I complained about it on Twitter and immediately a few people jumped to the defense of Google Translate and the Tweetdeck translation plug in. Mike Chelan, argued that these plug ins are "a decent start."
He's right. They are a decent start. In some cases, particularly the Romance languages of French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, as well as German, the reults are pretty good. You can almost always get the gist of what was said, even if you often lose certain nuances, such as irony, sarcasm and humor.
But in other cases, Asian and Middle Eastern languages, the translations make very often make no sense whatsoever.
In fact, the problem is that computers don't have any common sense. They have no feel for emotional or poetic flourishes. They trample on slang and metaphors and it is extremely difficult, it would seem to me, to be able to break these barriers, without having humans intervene in translation.
And humans are just not a very economic solution to the shortcomings of machine translation. I think it will remain a major challenge to get beyond the "decent start" we have made.
To me, this is an extremely important issue in social media. Translation is one of the great unresolved barriers.
Ultimately, my dream is for me to be able to post words in my own natural language, with the slang I use and the humor I sometimes try to infuse. Then you can read it in whatever your language is. You can respond using your language and I will then see it in my own.
This universal translation could allow people everywhere to talk with people everywhere. That direct human-to-human mode of conversation would not only be good for business and education, it wouyld also be good for world peace, or so it seems to me.
My hope is that somehow we can get beyond a "decent start," as Mike called it.
{ 2 trackbacks }
{ 8 comments }
Late comment!
You know what's scarier? When those folks start using g33ksp3@k (geekspeak) that apparently make no sense whatsoever.
Like: 介嘛時候了? 卧草泥馬，我車走了!
Translated, that'd be: Introduction Well time? Lying grass mud horse, my car go!
Which in essence is Tianjin-speak for: What time do we have now? Holy #Beep, my train's heading out!
And — oh Chinese — it's FULL of that... hint: when you see things such as horses and especially the grass mud horse, you know the tweep's in a rage. When you hear of harmonious crabs, you know the censors are stepping in...
An old story about machine translation in the 60s (no less!). This was an English -> Russian -> English exercise on a civil engineering corpus.
The English reviewers were puzzled after the double translation came back with references to "water sheep". Not many water sheep in UK civil engineering they thought. So back to the original to see what was meant. They were a bit shocked to see hydraulic rams.
I hope this story is not apocryphal - it seems just too good to be untrue.
Chris
twitter @seabird20
I wrote regarding Tweetdeck translation feature when it first came out, about the promise it holds for business communication. You can see it at http://theliquidbetsy.com/2009/03/the-rebuilding-of-babel/. I think we even the same picture! (Ah great minds…)
I totally get what you're saying. I too am friends with David F., and always get a kick out of translating his tweets- sometimes the explanation (often political) is more interesting.
I also love using the translation option just to express myself. Somehow, Italian is perfect for the start of the day breakfast-coffee musings, German for business and French for the more esoteric… A past boss from Munich (who happens to be multi-lingual, but who isn't in Munich) loves to see my posts, he thinks the resulting funny translations are charming.
All in good fun, but I would like to see the next step to more colloquial, "real" translations. Can you imagine how they would affect conversations and the effect would be?
Thanks Shel ;-)
Here's a little life challenge for people to try. Learn these simple words for "thank you" in other languages.
Hindi - Danyavad [dun (as in dunn and bradstreet) ya vaad]
Punjabi - Shukrya [shook-ria]
Spanish - Muchos gracias
French - merci beaucoup
Portugese - obrigado [from a male] | obrigada [from a female]
Farsi - Mamnoon
When you say these words to someone, look at their facial expression ;-) If you're not from this person's country, you've probably made a new friend. Well, that's been my experience.
You know Shel, my homeland has just over 100K and is an archipelago of islands in the South Pacific. The words "Kingdom of Tonga" are bigger than the small dots that represent my 'home' on most maps. You know this world is a very small place when you meet someone at the Gateway of India in Mumbai who speaks a little of your language. I think we are one of the countries that adds "min" to minority.
To be so far away from home and for a period of time then to hear my language spoken by a gentleman and his wife from Slovenia was mindblowing to say the least.
...and yes we're still in touch via email as they go to Tonga every year.
All the best.
@Iconic88
I love what you say: "...speaking to a person in their language shows arguably the highest forms of respect to that person. This is one of the quickest ways to break the ice and build trust."
Malo e lelei! Fantastic post Shel!...and wish your nomination for Morgan Freeman to win Best Actor goes well ;)
Language today in real time has created many silos. In the world of Twitterville (as you've beautifully described it), conversations happen all over the world in people's native tongues and these are people who are clients of businesses the world over.
From a business perspective, it would be wise for a company to hire people who are multi-lingual just like airlines do. Emirates for example has what feels like the UN on their planes.
We all feel comfortable talking in our language and businesses need to adapt too. They'll grab the attention of a customer much quicker than a business that doesn't. Can you imagine why people who speak other languages outside would return to using Emirates as a service or similar companies? The experience is less painful and more enjoyable because you don't have to keep explaining over and over again what you need.
With language comes an inherent understanding of the nuances and epistemology of how to relate to people. More importantly, speaking to a person in their language shows arguably the highest forms of respect to that person. This is one of the quickest ways to break the ice and build trust.
Bring on the universal translator! ;-)
Thank you.
check out universal translator Mojofiti---just released an iPhone app
Yes! I LOVE the global environment. I used a translator for awhile (when it was free) then stopped for awhile in 2009. Now back in social and new media, I think it's essential to have a translator so we can discuss things with many people from many countries. With intuitive software, there should be the ability for developers to work up translators that could handle the colloquial that is so much a part of our lives. Now... for a VC to fund such effort....!
@ginakay
Comments on this entry are closed.