Apparently letting Babel Fish handle your affairs of international diplomacy might not be such a good idea. Most high school students have grasped this notion – one simply has to input their English data into the machine and click on the English to French button to see what useless garble emerges, and well, if you don’t see it, your French teacher certainly will.
However, when a group of Israeli journalists were asked to submit their questions to the Dutch foreign ministry before a diplomatic visit, someone thought they could get away with using Babel Fish to translate their Hebrew into English.
The result begins with an introduction of “Hello Bud…” and goes on to discuss mothers and bed. While this might have been a charming anecdote if it involved some tourists and guidebook trying to find lodgings, it is a gross and ignorant error where international relations are involved.
The Guardian, out of the U.K., has an entertaining article about the snafu, that I recommend reading.
But, the big question now is: If some Israeli journalists thought Babel Fish an appropriate tool for phrase translation, how many of you out there are using this software to translate your letters, or Word documents, or, really, anything besides single words or short phrases??
If you are, here are a few words of caution:
1. Automatic or computer generated translations occupy only a specific place in text translation. You can insert a couple of words, or sometimes a phrase at a time and the result has a chance of coming off naturally. If, however, more than one sentence is entered, the wheels come off. And, well, if you are bilingual and haven’t tried it out, go ahead and do it now, it makes for great entertainment.
2. Nuance, persuasive language, and any culturally relative details will be missed. These are not tools for communicating effectively with an audience of any size, unless it is you, or your forgiving parents.
3. Best case: the translation is coherent, but not grammatically sound. Worst case: tragic misunderstanding. Either way, if your text is intended for anyone besides your nearest and dearest who doesn’t mind wading through some misunderstanding, there is no shortcut to working with an experienced translator. It might cost more than Babel Fish, that is “more than free” but your business personal and professional relationships are probably worth it.
4. A last note: computer generated translations cannot be made coherent with proofreading. Often words are completely mistranslated, as happened in the above-mentioned case of the Israeli journalists, or sentences are contorted and end up taking on new meanings. Proofreaders are not psychic, or at least most of them aren’t, which means that even if made intelligible your machine made translation may have completely lost its original meaning.
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