Computer translation

Last December, we became aware of a visitor to the Nordelph site who had used an automatic translation service to read the site in German. What he or she saw on the home page began like this:

It's hard not to be impressed by this -- especially when you realise that there has been absolutely no human intervention in the translation: a simple click on a button in one of the on-line translation services, and you could be reading this page in any major language you choose. This particular translation was accomplished by Babel Fish (followers of Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy will recognise the allusion), which can be found at world.altavista.com. This brings up the following simple dialogue:



Here you can choose to translate text that you type in or -- as in this case -- give the address of a website. And if you choose this option, the whole site is translated page-by-page as you visit them.

Babel Fish has made a rather good job of coping with the layout of this site while still translating the text. Of course, not all the text can be translated. The tabbed headings 'Nordelph Past', 'Nordelph Present' and so on aren't really text at all, but graphics, so they're left unchanged. Several elements of the German no longer fit into the space allowed for their English equivalents -- it doesn't hurt that the heading spills onto a second line, but the 'Quick Tour' and 'This Month' buttons have become a bit of a mess, albeit still functional.

For most of us, this is the stuff of science-fiction dreams. Machine translation (like wrist communicators and tele-port machines) was going to be an assured part of our future. But the early attempts were often ridiculously bad. The mythology of computing never fails to record the twin (possibly apocryphal) anecdotes involving translation from English into Russian and then back to English. 'Out of sight, out of mind' returned as 'Invisible and insane', while 'The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak' emerged from the round trip as 'The vodka is good, but the meat is rancid'.

So just how good is Babel Fish's performance on the Nordelph website? Armed only with school German, we can spot quite a few poor renderings -- if there are any native speakers out there, perhaps they could let us have a more considered evaluation. To make sense of what follows, you might like to open a copy of the translation in its own window, which you can resize and read along with the following.

First off, it seems that the heading to the page betrays a certain mechanical feel. 'NORDELPH GEMEINSCHAFTSWEB SITE' would seem to suggest that you're looking at the site of the Nordelph 'communityweb', whatever that is. A human translator would almost certainly have rendered the heading as 'NORDELPHGEMEINSCHAFTS WEBSITE' -- or some possibly more grammatical version of the same!

There's also some subtle grammatical irregularity -- totally understandable for an automatic translation, but irritating nevertheless.Our 'THIS MONTH' button becomes 'DIESER MONAT'. No problem there, except that this phrase is a label, so when it's referred to in our first story ('the THIS MONTH button will lead you through ...') it really ought to appear exactly the same -- except that Babel Fish turns it into 'DIESE MONAT', because it's trying to identify the correct grammatical usage in the new sentence. An interesting experiment would be to put 'THIS MONTH' into quotes, to see how Babel Fish copes then.

You may feel that the points we've dealt with are pretty precious. But without going too far into the site, we spot a couple of places where it's the wrong word that has been chosen.

Our second story on the November home page was about the whooper swans at Welney. The English text referred to 'the swan at Welney -- a 6 year old male called Blidfinnur'. This is rendered in German as 'ein 6 Einjahres männlicher angerufener Blidfinnur'. German has two words for 'call'. The one that's needed here, meaning 'called by name' is 'heissen', while Babel Fish has selected the word meaning 'called out to' or 'called on the telephone' -- 'rufen'. The rest of this sentence doesn't look too robust, either -- 'male' has become an adjective, and we're pretty sure that the '6 Einjahres' construction boils down to '6 one-year olds'!

Our next story introduced the Nordelph website Advent Calendar. 'Advent' showed Babel Fish at its most mechanical. It simply substituted the German for 'coming' -- 'aufkommen'. Unfortunately, in the ecclesiastical sense, the right substitution is 'der Advent'. Here, Babel Fish has paid no attention to the distinction between 'Advent' and 'advent'.

Let's admit right away that we're being incredibly petty here. We should perhaps be marvelling that Babel Fish allows us -- for free -- to generate a passable translation, perhaps with the odd howler to amuse those of us who want to appear superior to a mere computer. This is a cause for celebration, not for nit-picking. Translation can only get better. In the meanwhile, we really do marvel at living in 'eine kleine Ecke des Paradieses in den Norfolk Fennen' where the 'Nordelph Gemeinde-Ratsversammlung' benefits from the loyal service of our 'Gemeinde-Sekretärin'!