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Machine translation is being touted as the
future of translation and localization - a low cost or even
virtually cost free way to promote one’s business in every
corner of the world. While it is true that new and better
machine translation systems are being unveiled at a rapid rate
and that existing machine translation products are being
continuously upgraded, they remain a highly risky proposition
that can do more than damage your business when applied to
English to Chinese translation – two languages that are so
vastly different from each other not only grammatically and
linguistically but also culturally and socially. What are the risks and what could possibly go wrong?
Let’s look at a simple example, using what is
becoming the world standard in free machine translation tools,
Google Translate:
The sentence
'you are responsible for your own
actions'
Here is Google’s English to Chinese
translation
http://translate.google.com/#en|zh-CN|you%20are%20responsible%20for%20your%20own%20actions
你是为自己的行为负责
Now let’s take the Chinese and translate it
back to English:
http://translate.google.com/#zh-CN|en|%E4%BD%A0%E6%98%AF%E4%B8%BA%E8%87%AA%E5%B7%B1%E7%9A%84%E8%A1%8C%E4%B8%BA%E8%B4%9F%E8%B4%A3
You
responsible
for their own
behavior
This simple, straight-forward sentence works
perfectly in French:
http://translate.google.com/#en|fr|you%20are%20responsible%20for%20your%20own%20actions
vous êtes responsable
de vos propres
actions
Here is the French translated
back
to English:
http://translate.google.com/#fr|en|vous%20%C3%AAtes%20responsable%20de%20vos%20propres%20actions
you are responsible
for your own actions
It also translates correctly into
Spanish:
http://translate.google.com/#en|es|you%20are%20responsible%20for%20your%20own%20actions
usted es responsable
de sus propias
acciones
Here is the Spanish translated
back
into English:
http://translate.google.com/#es|en|usted%20es%20responsable%20de%20sus%20propias%20acciones
You
are responsible for
your own
actions
Notwithstanding the issue as to whether to use
the formal (vous or Usted) or the informal (tu), Google
Translate correctly handled French and Spanish, two languages
where the grammar around simple sentences is relatively similar,
however, Google’s machine translation tool completely fell apart
when handling two grammatically dissimilar languages,
translation from English into Chinese.
Once you move onto more complex or lengthy
sentences, even the French and Spanish will not read well. The
risks in terms of English to Chinese translation are all the
more magnified.
As an exercise, may I suggest that you do the
following: take a paragraph (any two or three sentences) from
your own website or online marketing materials, place them in
Google Translate (http://translate.google.com)
and translate them into Simplified Chinese. Then take the output
(what appears on the right side), put it back into the left
side, reverse the languages (switch it from English to
Simplified Chinese to Simplified Chinese to English), and look
at the output. Then, ask yourself:
is this what I would like a potential Chinese
buyer of my products or services to be reading about my company?
Not yet convinced? Try the same exercise on
these other popular machine translators:
World Lingo:
http://www.worldlingo.com/en/products_services/worldlingo_translator.html
SDL:
http://www.freetranslation.com/
Babel Fish:
http://babelfish.yahoo.com/
Microsoft Translator:
http://www.microsofttranslator.com/
An even greater risk than
just looking awkward
Here is an example that has been making the
rounds on the web. It is an extreme case, but it does illustrate the
dangers, especially when dealing with two languages that have such
completely different
writing systems.
A Chinese restaurant wanted an English
translation of their name. Here is the result:
 It’s pretty easy to guess what happened. In the process of creating
the sign, the restaurant tried to translate the Chinese name of the
restaurant into English using machine translation software. For
whatever reason, the software malfunctioned and provided the error
message, "Translation Server Error." As the user had no knowledge of
English, he or she took the error message to be the correct English
and that is what went
up
onto the sign. As you can see, the
risk can be egregiously high
for the business executive (or,
in this case, restaurant owner) who has no knowledge of the other
language and,
hence,
no reference point for a comparison.
These types of errors are extremely common. When someone opts to use
a machine translation system, it's usually because he or she wishes
to communicate with someone with whom they do not share a language
in common. They do not have anybody in their circle who knows both
languages and could act as a go-between or at least a proofreader.
As a result, they are in no position to understand the output and
have no other choice other than to trust the translation technology.
Let’s take it a step further in understanding what is being put at
risk: why, when it comes to English-Chinese translation in
particular, machine translation, even expensive systems that one
pays for, are incapable of providing something satisfactory.
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When the risk can be
life-threatening:
machine translation and healthcare
Employing machine translation is risky in any
industry or field, but presents particular dangers in
medicine The International Medical Interpreters
Association, a highly respected group, couldn’t
have been any more blunt in their warning: the
section on automated translation in the
association's Guide on Medical Translation,
published in 2009, is entitled "The perils of
machine translation." The association "strongly
cautions" medical staff against using machine
translation services.The guide cites an
example in Spanish of how Yahoo's Babel Fish,
one of the four most popular online machine
translators, handled a critical clinical
description: - English: Women with this
disorder appear to exhibit increased humoral
immune responsiveness and macrophage activation
while showing diminished cell-mediated immunity
with decreased T-cell and natural killer cell
responsiveness.
- Spanish: Las mujeres con este desorden
aparecen exhibir la activación inmune humoral
creciente de la sensibilidad y del macrófago
mientras que la demostración disminuyó inmunidad
transmitida por células con sensibilidad del
T-cell disminuido y de la célula de asesino
natural. The guide then explains the three
major errors in the translation of this single
sentence: "In the example above, the word
'disorder' became disorder in the sense of
confusion or mess in the target language, but in
the medical context, a proper equivalent exists
and it is 'trastorno.' The verb 'appear' was
translated not in the sense of appearance, but
in the sense of turning up. ‘Natural killer
cell’ became ‘the cell of the natural assassin.’
Those are just three errors among the many found
in this machine-translated passage." The above
was excerpted from "Sales May Be Lost In
Translation" by Jiri Stejskal, a book that
examines the pitfalls of poor translation, as
well as giving many examples – many of which are
humorous, but not necessarily suitable for a
discussion in mixed company! |
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Word sense disambiguation
An
insurmountable challenge for even the most sophisticated
machine translation systems
Word sense disambiguation occurs when translation
without context changes the intended meaning of a word
or expression. This is a common risk in any language, as
many commonly used words and expressions, no matter the
language, have multiple meanings.
Take the very commonly
used expression “make up”, do you mean:
- make up a missed class
- make up a story
- apply make up to one’s face
The wrong choice can lead to a very odd sounding
sentence in the foreign language.
Taking it a step
further, think of the number of metaphors that are
commonly used in English, for instance, the metaphor “a piece of
cake”. It might refer to an actual cake, or it might
mean that the action or task at hand is something very simple to
complete.
An example of poor word disambiguation hurting a website
is the government site of the city of Philadelphia, which employs machine translation to render
its web pages into multiple languages. The heading “Lead
Story” is translated as a “Story of Lead,” as in lead
paint. The mayor, in this case, has the misfortune of
sharing his surname with a common noun, with the result
that Mr. Street, becomes Herr Straße, Monsieur Rue, and
Señor Calle.
Machine translation is incapable of making the
distinction. Only a professionally trained translator
has the knowledge and sophistication to do so.
Furthermore, a good translator will take it a step
further, finding an expression that is not only
linguistically but also socially and culturally
appropriate while remaining faithful to the meaning of
the word or expression in the language of origin.
Wide differences
in sentence structure
A particular risk with the English to Chinese,
Chinese to English language pair
Besides the fact that English and Chinese
come from completely unrelated language
groups, with English a member of the
Indo-European group of languages that spread
from India across Europe and Chinese belonging
to the Sino-Tibetan family, there are essential
structural and grammatical differences
that prove
especially challenging to machine translation
systems.
Sentence structure. Structural differences
between Chinese and English, such as the
different orderings of head nouns and relative
clauses, are a fundamental difference between
the languages. Comparisons of machine
translation systems and how they handle
different languages show the English-Chinese
language pair to consistently have the poorest
results, even poorer than for other difficult
language pairs such as Arabic-English. Many of
these structural differences are related to the
ubiquitous Chinese
的 (DE) construction, used for a wide range of
noun modification constructions (both single
word and clausal) and other uses. In English,
the words, whether they be adjectives, groups of
nouns or clauses, can come both before and after
the noun, for example:
Before:
The dog’s paw
The blue coat
After:
The paw of the dog
The room, which was on the left side of the
hallway,…
In Chinese, the modifying elements virtually
always come before noun, the length of the
modifying component can be quite long, and there
is a wide range of noun modification
constructions. It is nearly impossible for
machine translation to make this distinction
beyond very short modifiers, and, even when the
machine translation software understands the
concept, it is incapable of deciding where the
set of modifying elements begins. Here is an
example:
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澳洲 |
是 |
与 |
北韩 |
有 |
邦交 |
的 |
少数 |
国家 |
之一。 |
|
Aozhou |
shi |
yu |
Beihan |
you |
bangjiao |
DE |
shaoshu |
guojia |
zhiyi. |
|
Australia |
is |
with |
North Korea |
have |
diplomatic relations |
that |
few |
countries |
one of. |
The actual meaning is:
Australia is one of the few countries that have
diplomatic relations with North Korea.
|
当地 |
一所 |
名声不佳 |
的 |
中学 |
|
local |
a |
bad reputation |
DE |
middle school |
The actual meaning is: ‘a local middle school
with a bad reputation’
Here is how three different machine translation
systems handled the sentence:
System 1: ‘a bad reputation of the local
secondary school’
System 2: ‘the local a bad reputation secondary
school’
System 3: ‘a local stigma secondary schools’
Proper uses for machine
translation
In all fairness, there are appropriate uses for machine
translation: when you need travel directions in preparing for or
during a trip to a foreign country, or you need to get the most
general meaning of a document when trying to decide whether it
is worth spending the money to have it professionally
translated.
But there is no place for machine translation
when it comes to promoting your company’s carefully crafted
message or protecting its hard-earned reputation.
It is true no matter the language pair, but
especially true with translation from English into Chinese or
the other way around. Employing a professional language
translation service offers a return on investment that can reap
benefits many times over. Not only do you gain the peace of mind
knowing that your message is going to be well understood in the
other language, your customers will notice the difference, too.
From the embarrassing to the deadly, translation
mistakes come at a high cost. They can be avoided by using
professional translators. Only a professional translator can
avoid the cultural clichés, literary references and sports
metaphors that do not make sense in other countries. We hope you
will take all of this into consideration when planning your
entry into China, Taiwan or Hong Kong or into any market where
Chinese is the dominant language.
We welcome you to contact us
should you wish to
discuss this article further or if you have an English to
Chinese or Chinese to English translation project that you are
contemplating.
Liu Yuanyuan, Director of Operations
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Chinese Translation Guide