LOLCode is a computer programming language concept which draws its vocabulary from the recent internet sensation of captioned cat pictures. Although not fully functional yet, it’s still linguistically fascinating on many different levels, and deserves mention.

i has dialect

One of the most interesting parts of this programming language is that it can exist at all, and the fact that it can goes a long way towards establishing the legitimacy of a feline dialect.

Imagine that I wanted to create a programming language based solely off of star wars vocabulary. I would likely start by finding a donor language, whose basic syntax and ideas I would borrow. Then, I would begin to slowly find equivalents and their translations.

Some equivalent/translation pairs might be obvious. ‘Death Star’ for a verb which meant “remove file”, maybe ‘carbonite’ for “pause process”. One could even get a bit more ornate and incorporate some movie quotes. Perhaps “there is an error” could be coded with ‘It’s a Trap!’, and “load this program” could be ‘Commence Primary Ignition’.

However, no matter how nerdy I felt at the time, my plan would be fatally flawed from the outset. Sooner or later, I would find an expression that was too niché (fulfilling just a small purpose) to have a Star Wars equivalent. I’d have to rely on a set canon of phrases to fill in the blanks, and there’s no way to work around it and still maintain the Star Wars theme.

The reason that LOLCode is so awesome is that, based on what I’ve seen so far, it doesn’t seem to have that limit. Based on my highly scientific research at icanhascheezburger.com, it would appear that LOLCat has become a full fledged dialect. There are many captioned images there, each slightly different, and each seems to fit a coherent grammatical pattern. Some linguists are starting to pick up on distinct patterns and grammatical rules, and based on the fact that any sentence can now be LOLCatted, I’m quite tempted to say that LOLCat has become a productive and functional dialect of English.

Because of this productivity of the LOLCat dialect, it would be quite possible for somebody to take any given sentence or idea and put into LOLCat, thus ensuring that LOLCode could, in theory, become fully functional without ever breaking character. This is very exciting, and very awesome.

mai translationz r not straitforwerd

LOLCode is a very special sort of translation. Conventionally, when one sits down to label a cat, the source is an English sentence (I’m yet to find any cats “en mi refrigeradora, comiendo mis comidaz”). However, here, what people are doing is finding equivalents in human/feline language for concepts, verbs, and ideas within a computer language.

Rather than being able to simply translate, they’re forced to create the inflexible, ambiguity free grammar required to tell a computer what to do. This is tough enough to do even using all sorts of abstract symbols, but to do it within LOLCat dialect and syntax is wonderfully difficult. They’re adapting a human language into a dialect, then bending it into a computer language. This is by no means an easy ask, and it’s a far more complex sort of translation than many.

For this alone, I salute the creator and contributors to LOLCode. Although it may seem silly to some, this is really some top-of-the-line linguistic work.

d00d. ur dialect is teh suxx0rs

Perhaps the even interesting than the mere fact that LOLCat has become a translatable dialect is the fact that, well, there are already people who are arguing about the “correct” way to say something in LOLCat. Take, for instance, this post on the LOLCode wiki:

I know VISIBLE is the current output command, but it’s so not LOLCAT. What if we used LOL as the output instead? So, the Count-1 example becomes:

(Code)

I think this works very well, is funny to read and matches actual LOLCAT protocol, sorta. I guess the LOL would be at the end normally.

As a linguist, this is really, really exciting. People are already trying to step in and enforce the “rules” of the LOLCat dialect. It seems like, as a “native speaker” of LOLCat, the author of this page had a distinct intuition about the “proper” means of expressing a concept in this dialect. Truly incredible.

Although this community of people has only arisen recently, I’m very excited at the potential for the later discussions of “proper” LOLCat, and the sociolinguistic goodness sure to arise from it.

o hai. i discussed ur werk.

So, author of (and contributors to) LOLCode: I salute you. This is a unique, wonderful, and groundbreaking project, and I really hope that it continues to yield such fascinating linguistic insight into the future.

Keep up the good work, and don’t let anybody convince you that what you’re building is silly or unnecessary. If there are two things that the world of technology needs, it’s probably humor and cute, fuzzy animals, and really, I can’t think of a better way to combine the two.

Alright, I’m done. kthxbye

One example of a Bash.org quote about language is this one, reproduced here in its entirely:

< %kiwibonga> Je ne donne pas un merde – I don’t give a shit
< %kiwibonga> THAT MAKES NO SENSE
< %kiwibonga> you cannot give a shit to someone
< %kiwibonga> in french
< %kiwibonga> that sounds like “I’m taking a shit in my hands and I’m keeping it for myself”

(For those unfamiliar with the source here, the above quote is referring to the English idiom “I don’t give a shit”, which means, roughly, “I really don’t care” or “I couldn’t care less”.)

This is a wonderful (and humorous) example of the fact that one cannot literally translate some idioms into another language and expect them to retain their meaning.

In many ways, an idiom is a phrase which has cultural meaning independent of the words that make it up. If I say “that’s the way a cookie crumbles” to a politician who just lost an election, I’m not implying that his campaign sat out too long, got stale, and then broke into small pieces when touched. Instead, I expect him to know that I’m saying that such things happen in life, and that I sympathize. There’s nothing in the words per se that carries the meaning, but instead, it’s based in a certain cultural knowledge shared by the two people.

When you start translating these idioms, you end up copying over the words, but the meaning is lost because there’s no shared cultural background. Once that’s lost, one has to read the literal meaning of the words, and thus, “I’m taking a shit in my hands and keeping it for myself”.

This principle isn’t necessarily universal. If I said “A bird in hand is worth one hundred flying” (from Spanish), most people could understand it to mean the same thing as the idiom “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”. “That’s flour from a different sack” (also Spanish), in context, would likely be understood to mean “That’s a whole different story”.

However, in most cases, the meaning of an idiom comes not from the words themselves, but from the originating culture. The moral of this story: When you translate idioms word-for-word, if the snake bites you, there’s no remedy in the pharmacy.

(That, or you’re playing with fire. Either way.)

Now, as somebody who uses the IPA very, very frequently, such a thing would be wonderful if it worked well. However, I think it would be impossible to actually create a program that goes from English writing to IPA transcriptions without incredible advances in Artificial Intelligence and speech recognition. Here’s why…

Transcription, not translation

At the surface, this doesn’t seem so crazy. Apple includes a widget to do rough, automated translations with Dashboard, and although I never trust automated translations, it does alright for basic words and phrases. I suspect that our anonymous searcher saw that widget and thought “Wow, cool! I wonder if it can help me put something into the IPA”. However, the fundamental difference between translating a sentence into Spanish and putting that same sentence into the IPA is that the IPA isn’t really a language at all, but instead, it’s a method of writing sounds.

The International Phonetic Alphabet is really a set of symbols, each of which represents a sound, sound characteristic, or other element of spoken language. What the IPA allows a linguist (or speech pathologist, or teacher…) to do is to take spoken language and put it onto paper (‘transcription’) with a great deal more precision than most other writing systems. The IPA isn’t a language in itself, it’s just an alternative, phonetic writing system for other languages. The beauty of this is that the IPA is designed to be able to be used not just for English, but for any language. The IPA symbols can be used to transcribe sounds not just from English, but from languages all over the world.

Broad vs. Narrow Transcription

The IPA can be used to transcribe sounds with two different degrees of precision.

If one takes advantage of all the symbols and diacritics, one can make a “narrow” or “phonetic” transcription. At this level, the linguist aims to capture all the detail possible about the word or phrase, including variations across word boundaries, sounds that occur in speech but are unnoticed or unrecognized by native speakers, and even features like intonation and pauses. From these transcriptions, a well-trained linguist could pronounce the words and phrases almost exactly as the speaker did, based simply on the transcriptions. The first, smallest line in the title graphic is a narrow transcription of me pronouncing the site’s title.

This degree of precision would be impossible for a modern computer widget to produce, simply because narrow transcriptions are based on actual words and phrases by a speaker, and really, one needs a fairly trained ear to make an accurate narrow transcription of a word or phrase. Sure, it could use a database of narrowly transcribed words from other speakers, but really, that’s not a narrow transcription. It’s not going to pick up on the variations that each speaker produces, like accents, vowel changes, unusual sound choices, or even tiny speech errors.

The alternative is called “broad” or “phonemic” transcription, expresses the basic sounds of a language or phrase, often more precisely than the native writing system, but at the same time, leaves out detail that’s not necessary to a native speaker. The middle line in the title graphic for this page is a phonemic transcription. Some dictionaries, including the built in OS X dictionary (if you enable IPA in Dictionary Preferences), can show you the standard american IPA Broad transcription form of a word.

Now, using a dictionary of words in a given language and their IPA equivalents, a computer could likely match things and give a passable broad transcription. However, there are variations that occur between people that show up even at a broad level, and are large enough to identify a speaker’s accent, dialect, or even idiolect. For some people (myself included), “caught” and “cot” have the same vowel, but for others, they’re two distinct vowels. So, even at a broad level, you’re not going to get any sort of reliable transcription of one’s actual speech from a computer widget, just a rough approximation.

Why are you transcribing anyways?

In the end, whether such a widget would be useful at all boils down to your reason for needing a transcription. Some people might be learning English and would want a better method of knowing how a given word is supposed to sound. For that, any good dictionary’s pronunciation key should do the trick.

Some people might be interested in the IPA, or want to know how a given word sounds. For that, they’d be better off getting a good phonetics textbook and learning a bit of the IPA themselves, along with some knowledge of phonetics.

However, our widget searcher might just be stuck in an introductory Linguistics course, having to transcribe their speech for an assignment. If so, I offer just one piece of advice: Don’t plagarize transcriptions off the web or from a dictionary. Your professor should have no trouble noticing if you’re not transcribing your own dialect, and everybody’s got a dialect.

Remember, if there’s one thing that phonetics professors are good at, it’s picking out a phone-y.

Cross-Galactic Communication

In the series, the Galaxy is invaded by a very nasty species called the Yuuzhan Vong, who come from outside the galaxy and speak a very different language than “Basic”, the accepted trade language of Star Wars. As you might expect, the Yuuzhan Vong cannot understand Basic, and the rest of the Galaxy cannot understand the Vong. This language barrier, as you can imagine, can play a significant role in any situation.

Both sides have ways of compensating for this, though. The New Republic (those in charge of the Galaxy after the Star Wars movies) uses technology to overcome the barrier, with translator robots (“droids”) doing the talking and translating for them (one book mentions offhand that the Yuuzhan Vong language is remarkably similar to an existing language, thus, permitting translation). The Yuuzhan Vong, on the other hand, bring with them complex biotechnology (living ships, weapons, even living implants), and to solve the language problems, use a small worm embedded in the ear called a “Tizowyrm“.

A Tizowyrm understands what is said in another language, and then translates it for the host creature. This is strikingly similar to the Babel Fish in the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, a small fish that lives in the ear and translates similarly.

The Tizowyrm’s magical Phonological powers

So, the Babelfish in Hitchhiker’s guide only allowed one to understand other species. So, I would talk to the alien in English, the Babelfish would translate for them, and they would respond in their language, which would be translated for me. However, if the other party didn’t have a Babelfish, there would be vast confusion. This is, as far as translation fish go, fairly believable. If a creature such as that could exist, that wouldn’t be an unthinkable way of their functioning.The Yuuzhan Vong Tizowyrm, however, is purported to allow one to speak in the other language as well as understand it. This is where I start to grow more wary.

Sure, in theory, the Tizowyrm could read the mind of the Vong, understand what he wants to say, and then say it in Basic into his ear. However, that doesn’t mean he could instantly say it.

Imagine if I were to whisper a Russian phrase into your ear once. Do you think you could repeat it without speaking Russian? How about Chinese or Thai? Languages all have different sound systems, and just because you hear a given sound or tone, that doesn’t mean that you’re going to be able to pronounce (or even hear) it. Hearing something alone doesn’t allow you to say it. You must train your tongue and mouth to make the required motions (and strings of motions) until it becomes second nature to do so. This is one of the more difficult parts of learning a language, and this is also one of the reasons that children have a far easier time of picking up languages. They’re better able to learn the required gestures.

This also relies on the assumption that the Yuuzhan Vong are capable of producing the language at all. The entirety of the Basic-speaking Star Wars universe flows on the idea that there’s a single language which can be spoken by most species. However, this is fairly unlikely. The human vocal tract is incredibly advanced and complex, and a single change (say, in the tissue binding the tongue to the bottom of the mouth) could render entire groups of sounds unpronounceable. So, to imagine that a group of Extragalactic aliens has the required phonetic apparatus to create (or mimic) all the sounds of Basic is a little far fetched.

However, this is even more far-fetched with the Yuuzhan Vong. The vong also have a disturbing tendency towards self-mutilation. One prominent leader, Warmaster Tsavong Lah, is described as having lips that have been cut into small strips and which flail about when he talks. Somehow, though, he seems to have no trouble with bilabial consonants (which involve the use of both lips) such as “b” and “p” when speaking Basic in the book. Similarly, I suspect that Vong with a ritually split tongue would have trouble with laterals (like ‘L’) among other sounds.

The Tizowyrm, then, must be truly magical. Not only does it translate complex, culturally loaded statements with ease, but it allows one to overcome his or her language background and use sounds correctly to speak “the language of the infidels”.

Then again, maybe this is just a fictional Sci-Fi series written for Star Wars fans and not Phonetics nerds. Yeah, that’s probably it after all.

As you’ve likely already noticed, I’m making some changes to the design of the site. As such, in the next few days, you might find the site to be temporarily down (or badly formatted) every once in a while. I encourage you to reload the page in a few minutes if you stumble onto the site during a bad moment, and you’ll likely find any issues fixed. Feedback on the site design is welcome, and nothing’s completely set in stone.

As always, I had to add a Linguistic subtext to the post. So, I lifted part of the headline text straight from this picture, showing a badly translated road sign. Isn’t it amazing what people can come up when they’re translating into a language they’re not familiar with? I just hope my future translation mistakes are as funny…

So, let’s say that I wanted to translate a modern Spanish novel into English. For the purposes of this article, I’ll be using the terms “source text/language” to refer to the Spanish version, and using “target language/text” to refer to the English translation.
Translation would be far more simple if all languages were identical, abstract sets of words, used identically by everybody. If this were the case, every word construction, tense, or framing would have an exact duplicate in every other language in the world. The English word ‘Table’ would be exactly the same as the Spanish ‘Mesa’, and every time you saw ‘Table’, you could just switch it out with ‘mesa’. So, ideally, I would sit down with my dictionary and my reference grammar and start replacing English words, sentences, and paragraphs with their Spanish “equivalents”. Once this substitution was complete, I would have a perfectly accurate copy of the original text which was completely understandable to a speaker of the target language.

As convenient as that would be, it’s not remotely true. Even in our quick example, ‘Table’ in English has a number of different meanings, and not all are covered by the Spanish ‘mesa’ (ranging from a Data Table, to “tabling” a resolutions). No two languages are exactly equivalent, and although some words might have quick and easy equivalents in both the source and target language, the vast majority of words and constructions will require the translator to make some decisions.

When these decisions start being made, there’s an opportunity for bias. Let’s say I come across the Spanish phrase “Mas vale pajaro en mano que ciento volando” in the novel. I need to make a choice here, as to how to translate it. Literally, it means “A bird in the hand is worth more than a hundred flying.” However, English does have a very, very similar expression, “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”. So, I can translate literally, and favor the Source Language (Spanish) phrasing, or I can translate using the English idiom, and favor the Target Language.

In this case, the main difference will be in terms of native target language speaker’s perception. Using the literal Spanish would be what translators often refer to as a “difference” preference or “favoring the source language “, the choice to use different phrasing and, even through the translation, emphasize that the source language and the author’s words are different than how an English speaker might have written things. On the other side, using the English [[idiom]] might be referred to as “identity” preference (or “favoring the target language”), where the translator tries to make the target language text as accessible, understandable, and familiar as possible to target language readers.

This example is fairly simple, in that really, a native English speaker will understand what the phrase means even if it’s translated literally. However, imagine you’re given an idiom like “Estar como perro en barrio ajeno”, literally, “to be like a dog in a neighbor’s yard”. If one were to translate that literally, the target language readers might understand the words, but miss the meaning entirely. However, Ii one translated it (more accurately) as “to be like a fish out of water”, the target language reader would have a much easier grasp on the meaning behind it.

There are always other factors at play in the decision of translating certain phrases. I’ve been learning about translation theory with one of the professors in my department, and he recently made a very interesting comment about the translation of Native American stories and literatures. We were going through one of his translations of an [[Arapaho]] speech, and we stumbled across a particularly colorful phrase (along the lines of “walking into the other group’s camp”). He translated it literally for me, but he put it into the English version as a single English word, “assimilation”. When I asked why, he explained that he didn’t want to make it sound like the stereotypical, disney-style Native American speech. He said that although the Arapaho often do use metaphors related to the Old Ways, hunting and nature, he often chooses not to translate them literally, because he feels it really just reinforces the stereotype of how their language sounds, rather than the actual message of the story or speech.

So, every translation has a bit of bias. However, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. This is a choice, and a tool in the hands of a skilled translator, and very seldom is a translation done favoring ONLY the target or source languages. Although translation theorists will likely argue this point, I suspect that the most accurate translation will likely fall somewhere in the middle, with a mix of difference and identity.
Sometimes, you need to favor the target language, to make the book clear, understandable, and readable to the readers, but sometimes you need to favor the source language, if for no other reason, just to remind the reader that the original work wasn’t written two weeks ago in Des Moines.

Suggested Readings:

Introducing Translation Studies by Jeremy Munday : A good primer on translation theory and many of the issues discussed here (albeit with a generalized target language bias)

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Pevear and Volokhonsky translation: A great book, and a more Target language biased translation.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Constance Garnett translation: The same great book, but this is a more source language favoring translation.

What did the above statement mean to you? Some people might see it as a sort of confession, my confessing to an act that you might not have been aware of, but without much in the way of context. However, for the readers versed in American history and mythology, that statement likely evoked the words of George Washington, declaring to his father that he chopped down a cherry tree and being a shining pillar of honesty in the process. So, perhaps the question for them was twofold: Why is he talking about this, and why is he pretending to be George Washington?

Well, not to disappoint, but I’ve never cut down a cherry tree, and, considering that the statement was false, I apparently can tell a lie. However, I can prove a point with it as well. For those who were familiar with George Washington’s quotation, that statement had an entirely different meaning than for those of you who missed the reference. At least a part of the meaning in that statement was dependent on your knowing something about the background behind my word choice.

Now, imagine you walk up to a coworker, relieved at the successful conclusion of a long, drawn out project. Smiling, you enthusiastically proclaim “It’s over!!” He stares at you for a second, and promptly breaks into tears and runs off to the men’s room. You just stand, mortified, unsure what you said or did to get such a reaction, until later, he comes back, still teary eyed, and explains that only a week ago, his now ex-wife had used those same words as she presented him with unexpected divorce papers, and that your using the unintentionally called back on that. He explains that he too is happy that the project is over, and apologizes for the breakdown.

There’s really nobody at fault here, this was just an unfortunate usage of a phrase which had a different meaning to each party in the communication. This is also a very extreme example, but still, it emphasizes the fact that meaning and connotation of words can be very individual, even on top of the widely agreed “definition” among speakers.

When you walk up to a person on the street and mention the term “dog”, their interpretation will be very different depending on their life experiences. Whereas one person with a phobia might get apprehensive, a veterinarian might smile or show concern, another person might think of Sparky, their childhood pet, and a dog breeder might start picturing a specific breed or characteristic. It’s unlikely that somebody would think of one characteristic or image to the point where they wouldn’t get the reference to a generic domesticated canine, but it’s also very unlikely that a person would only see a generic, faceless, breedless dog with no connotation.

I’m sure there are some voices in semantic theory that would disagree (and they’re welcome to comment or email me to let me post their opinion), but often, the “meaning” of a word for every individual person is the sum of their past experiences with that word and what it might have symbolized. If a child got bitten by a dog, the word “dog” might have a terrible connotation the week after, but if they were to go on to work at an animal hospital, that connotation might be replaced or altered.

One could pretend that all words have a nice, easy, abstract meaning, found in the dictionary and independent of the people using it. However, in practice, every word has both a general meaning, shared by most speakers of the language, and then a more individual shade of meaning, unique to their experiences. Knowing the context, both in which you’ll use a word, and in which the listener will hear it, is vital to understanding what to say, when.

This is easier said than done, of course, because you can very seldom get in the head of your listener to know just what a given word means to them. However, it’s always worth keeping in mind, because once you do, saying “I am glad for the successful completion of our newest project” to your newly divorced co-worker doesn’t sound nearly as awkward, does it?

“I would like to share my deepest concern about custom plates that your department issuing to the customers.”
…
“I would like to give you an example of such custom plate. The number is “CTO XYEB” registered in NY. In Russian it mean “one hundred penises” in a very dirty language.”

Now, having studied some Russian in the past, I nearly fell out of my chair laughing at this. Although it could easily have been an unfortunate random letter combination, the English letters “CTO XYEB” correspond to the cyrillic letters spelling a vulgar equivalent of “one hundred penises” (pronounced, “Sto huyev”) in Russian, and with amazing grammatical correctness, too.

In Russian, when counting an object, the declension of the word changes (a different ending is placed on it). So, one object is in the Nominative case singular, two is in the nominative plural, and five or more is in the Genitive Case plural, changing ‘Odin huy’ (one penis) to ‘Sto huyev’ (one hundred penises). So, in addition to be quite dirty, it’s quite grammatical.My apologies, by the way, for the transliteration. Cyrillic fonts seem to break my blogging software.Whether some enterprising young Russian speaker slipped one past the DMV, or whether a random motorist was stricken with a rather interesting random combination, this is another magnificent example of cross-linguistic translation and censorship difficulties, and a good reminder that with thousands of languages out there, it’s tough not to offend somebody sometimes.

So, if you see a brown Mercedes in Brooklyn with this magnificent license plate, you’re welcome to inform the driver of the mistake and recommend a trip to the DMV, give him or her a few choice words in Russian, or, if you’re like me, fall down laughing in the gutter. It’s all good, really.

The young Mormon piped up with a very innovative analogy on translation which he learned in Seminary, which I felt was quite interesting. I’ll roughly paraphrase below:

The word of God is a lot like a picture hanging on a bulletin board. It only has one tack to secure it [representing the Old and New Testament], so anybody can spin it around as they’d like, changing the perspective, even though the picture stays the same. The translators each tilt it a bit differently, and it’s tough to see exactly what the right orientation is.

For us [those of the Mormon Faith], the Book of Mormon is a second tack. It provides a second hold, and keeps you from spinning the picture. Whenever there’s a question about the perspective and translation in one, you can consult the other. What might be unsure with one tack, is securely locked with two.

Whether you believe in the validity of either work, this is an interesting analogy. It seems to imply a distinct split between the actual “word” or message of God, and the written words used to pass it on, much like the split between concept and language used to describe it.

A similar idea is actually used frequently in the translation of a seminal work in Mahayana Buddhism, the Bodhicharyavatara (‘Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life’) by Shantideva. Very early after its transcription (originally in Sanskrit), two highly authoritative versions were created of the work, one in Tibetan, and one in Sanskrit, and both are treated as equal by the Buddhist community. In modern translations, many of the translators choose to base their work off one version or the other, but use the other version to clarify difficult passages. My personal favorite translation, by Stephen Batchelor, was based on a 12th Century Commentary on the Tibetan text, but uses the Sanskrit for clarification in footnotes. When you’re dealing with differences as extreme as that between “May all women become men” and “May all women attain the rights and privileges of men”, a point of clarification is wonderful.

Now, let’s use a similar idea in a secular sense. I would like to describe an event, something complex, emotional, and generally slightly vague. Take, for example, an account of one’s first day leaving for College. Imagine a bilingual author were to write the story, once in, say, English, and once in Spanish. Not so much translating one into the other, but actually telling the story twice (with an effort to include much of the same information in both). Would the Spanish be a “second tack” for the English version and vice-versa? Could one use the Spanish to clarify the English ambiguities, and vice-versa? Most importantly, would another bilingual reader have a better idea what the author meant by reading both versions, rather than just one?

The more I look at it, translation seems messier and messier. I’ve begun to suspect that there is no such thing as a one-to-one translation, and that any time you switch languages or rephrase, something is lost or gained. This isn’t necessarily bad, but it, like all other things, needs to be studied further.

I hope this post made sense. If not, maybe I’ll try writing the same thing right next to it in Spanish. If it helps, I’ve just found a thesis.

This program takes any given English sentence, and then runs it through Altavista’s Babelfish translation engine 7 times, translating into one language, then plugging the result in and translating back to English, then translating that into the next language, continuing through Japanese, Chinese, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and German. It takes a little while, but in the end, you’re presented with a step-by-step view of what happened. The results are sometimes strange, occaisionally funny, and always dead wrong.

For instance, the title of this post is 0ccasional probable he translation of the machine of controll with. This, as you might suspect, is the product of Multibabel. The original phrase I entered was “Computer translation can sometimes prove troublesome”.

Although this program is a slightly biased test (I doubt that asking a series of professional translators to pass along a phrase like this would result in the same phrase at the end), it does show the difficulties of current web based automated translation engines. I particularly enjoyed this quote, by the program author on the program website:

As of September 2003, translation software is almost good enough to turn grammatically correct, slang-free text from one language into grammatically incorrect, barely readable approximations in another.

Sadly, this hasn’t changed all that much since then. There are people working hard to improve it, and strides are being taken, but it’s still a long journey ahead.

So, try Multibabel, get a few chuckles, and just in case anybody you know is tempted to just translate that essay for their language class online, remember:

if immediate translation of the stupid we-machine or the thymus of
vist two, collapse; of that disabled person, you with you

(Which was originally: “When you use machine translation to cheat, you’ll look stupid, dishonest, or both; and no matter what, you’ll fail.”)