Online translators: then and now
A brief history of the joys and perils of the development of online automated machine translation
You say potato, I say じゃがい も
Within the past 10 years, the Internet has spread fast and spread wide. As the most popular medium of communication, it has reached some of the most remote corners of the world, making it possible for people from all over to communicate with each other. However, along with the fantastic possibilities the Internet has to offer, we have to face new communication challenges --the most popular being language barrier.
Due to the vast availability of information in English, since before the Internet was even conceived, a large amount of students around the world have been taking it upon themselves to learn this language as part of their professional education. And although it is true that nowadays people from all cultures are speaking in English, it is also true that most people are not. Furthermore, if you were to have a specific need, such as doing commerce in China, getting customer support from a company in Russia, or meeting the love of your life on the Internet, the pool of people who speak English in these specific areas could be significantly reduced, and suddenly the breach between two people who don't speak the same language could turn into an abyss.
A word of hope
Years ago some researchers realized the huge and increasing demand of translations and have been working on a reliable, massively accessible and cost-effective solution ever since. Human translation had to be ruled out from the beginning, as the wages paid for this service can only be afforded by medium to big-sized companies and is out of reach for people like you and me. So these researchers turned to the most logical alternative: machine translation.
The first automated translation tools made publicly available on the Internet shone light on an undeniable fact: computers don't speak. A very easy experiment, consisting of translating a paragraph from English to another language, and then translating the resulting text back into English, proved to any English speaker that translation is not a matter of simply replacing words with their corresponding translation. The fact is computers are incapable of telling well-formed paragraphs from gibberish, much less translating from one language to another while keeping the original sense. Computer translation seemed useless at this stage and online translation quickly lost appeal to the users as a reliable translation alternative.
However, multilingual interpreters, computer whizzes and linguistics specialists alike continued their research of the underlying structures of language. Their objective was to understand human language to a point they could abstract general grammar rules, draw exceptions and finally derive translation recipes that could guide the computer through the translation process. The result of their collaboration in the development of computerized translation has finally begun to bear fruit.
Modern instant translation: a blessing or a curse?
Have you ever meant to say one thing to a person, but the person understood the completely opposite? Human language is so intricate and full of possibilities that not even two speakers of the same language can always understand each other. Imagine what would happen if both of you spoke in different languages that neither could understand!
This is the most difficult challenge machine translation developers face: even if they developed the most sophisticated translating machine, there is never the certainty that it will translate everything keeping the exact original intent and sense. But of course, for our humble purposes, we don't really need a perfect translator. We just need a translation tool good enough to convey the general meaning of a phrase, and we can still rely on the reader or listener to make out what is missing from context. After all, this is what we already do when a human translator is not at the level of a native speaker.
Today's automated translators are at a much more advanced stage than word-to-word translation, but are not at a level good enough to convey the general meaning without exception either. They are at a level in which great simplicity of terms and phrases is required, as well as a careful spelling and grammar, in order to be a reliable translation tool. Also, when being the recipient of such a translation, an open mind and a good disposition are needed, as well as curiosity and deduction skills in order to fill out the gaps sill present in automated translation.
Long has been the road and long it will be to achieve accurate machine translation. As translation demand increases, more researchers and companies offering the service are investing in perfecting their translation tools. While we get there, we can only use the tools available, but always be cautious and understand that these are still in development. So when doing business or finding love in a foreign language, be clear, be patient, have good humor --and when in doubt, ask again!
