Posted by Alan on October 15, 2003 at 02:07:01
Anovagrrl,
I got around to trying out the babelfish translator at http://babelfish.altavista.com, and got some very interesting results. Since I'm fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, I did some testing of those languages.
I entered "cock the hammer" and Babelfish translated it to Spanish.
It responded with "amartille el martillo." Huh? I don't think so muchacho!
Just for yucks, I pasted this screwy translation back into the text entry box, and asked babelfish to convert it back to English.
It turned it into "hammer the hammer."
Hmm... that was weird! I tried another simple phrase:
"The cock crows."
Babelfish turned it into "Los cuervos del martillo." Nope...wrong again!
I pasted this mangled translation into the edit box and asked for the English translation.
Babelfish responded with "The crows of the hammer." Wow! I didn't know hammers could crow!
I also took some Spanish and Portuguese text, and translated it with babelfish into English. It did an adequate job, but there were some strange and obtuse sentences in the translation. It especially had problems with slang terms, and would give a translation that was way off the mark.
This tool is okay for a quick and dirty translation of foreign language text into your native tongue, but I would not recommend relying on it to communicate with people who don't know English. The results are very unpredictable, and you might give them a message that is quite different from what you intended! Gee...I wonder if those hammers lay eggs?
I don't think human translators have to worry about being replaced by translation software, (at least not this software).
Alan
P.S. I sent the above message to a friend who is a professional translator, and he sent me an interesting and amusing article from the BBC:
Getting lost in the Translation:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/3186936.stm