Happy
New Year! I am a firm opponent of resolutions for the New Year but if I was
going to make a resolution, maybe it would involve learning another language –
or maybe not…

If
you remember back to the 1978 bestselling comedy science fiction book by
Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, there was a wonderful
creature called the Babel Fish. It was a creature that was placed in the ear of
Vogons and Betelgeusians and Humans to allow them to have clear, coherent
conversations as the Babel Fish excreted a telepathic matrix into the ear of
the host.

We
aren’t quite at that point but the world of language translation has made leaps
and bounds in recent years.

The
human translation and interpreting industry generates $37 billion a year at the
moment and I can see many organisations wanting a piece of that pie with their
technology. There are three main areas that are being worked on as we speak.

Firstly,
there are organisations dedicating themselves to live real-time translations
for conferences and speeches. The communication is mostly one-way and a small
delay in the translation does not create any major problems. Human translators
are mainly used in this area at the moment. When I have been involved with
human translators in the past, I always wonder if they translate exactly what
you say. A twenty second segment of speech sometimes turns into three seconds
of translated talk. Given the fact that I have no idea what the translator has
said, they may have just said “that bit was boring” or worse. “He tried to be
funny – laugh at his big nose.” Machine translation takes away any possibility
of bias introduced by the translator – but also introduces the possibility of a
misinterpretation by not picking up on nuances or ambiguity.

The
second area is in written translations. This is an area that we often find
amusing when we read the instructions that come with products manufactured in
other countries. I once saw some noodles that proudly stated that “Our food is
guaranteed not to cause pregnancy.” I can only assume they wanted to say the
food was safe for pregnant women. Some of these interpretations are mildly
amusing but when it comes to legal contracts or more detailed instructions,
misinterpretations can mean loss of money or even loss of life. The
organisation that can produce high-quality text translations that are accurate
will take over this space. One trick I find amusing is to write a paragraph of
normal English and use a tool to translate it into a foreign language and then
use a different tool to translate it back into English. Then compare what you
see to the original text. My favourite fail is the Restaurant in China that has
their name in Chinese and beside it, in letters almost a metre high, is the
English equivalent of their restaurant name. There was obviously a problem with
the translation tool they used because the restaurant’s name is “Translate
server error.”

The
third area that is expanding rapidly is the social translation market. There
are new apps almost every day that allow the traveller to explore countries
never before considered. One company recently released a set of earpieces that
allows two people to communicate back and forth in different languages in the
best interpretation of the Babel Fish yet. It does have the limitation that
only those two can be in a conversation but it is a first step. There are a
huge number of apps available – such as SayHi; Google Translate; iTranslate;
Voice Translator; iHandy Translator; Worldictionary and the list goes on. If
you are travelling overseas, do a quick search and experiment with some of
these. You will be surprised at just how good they are.

They
have certainly come a long way since 2009. I was in Paris in April that year
when swine flu hit the world. On the morning I had to fly out, I woke up with a
temperature and airports were being very conservative in allowing people to
fly, so I had to see a doctor. With no ability to communicate with the French
doctor, I pulled out my computer and went to an early version of Google
Translate. I typed in that I needed to be cleared of swine flu so I could fly
later that day. He looked at my translation – and then at me – and typed in a
message that was translated back and asked me to remove my shoe so he could
examine my toe!

Maybe
I should still learn another language after all.

Mathew Dickerson

 

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