Machine Translation Trumps Zero Translation

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Global Watchtower

Common Sense Advisory Blogs

Posted by Donald A. DePalma on July 16, 2005 in the following blogs: Translation and Localization, Web Globalization, Business Globalization, Technology, Interpreting, Market Data, Global Marketing, Best Practices, Supplier Business Issues
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The Outer Banks Sentinel from Nags Head, North Carolina (or "Cabeza De las Quejas," as its machine-translated Spanish website calls the little town) has added a translator to its website that will allow Spanish-speaking readers to access news in a language that they are comfortable with."

The article describes the increasing number of Spanish-speakers in the region and the paper's need to communicate with them, especially in emergency situations like the hurricanes that swept through the region last year and are again pounding the southeast U.S. this year.

This laudable initiative supports our long-time contention that MT is a good alternative to ZT (zero translation). It fully complies with one of the principles of our Automated Translation Manifesto which requires full disclosure -- whenever a translation is not made by a human being, it should be clearly labeled as an automated translation. It's not that we're concerned with the Turing Test and the ALIZA experiment; rather, it forewarns the visitor that there may be some inaccuracies with the translation, and thus somewhat protects the company using the MT from damage to its brand and maybe from liability (prospective plaintiffs should seek experienced counsel).

The Outer Banks Sentinel uses Google's free machine translation service to translate articles on demand into Spanish. Some of the resulting translations are naturally laughable (like translating the name of the city and the name of the newspaper), but the initiative is nonetheless commendable.

Besides fine-tuning the lexicon to avoid translating place names and other proper names, we would recommend three things: 1) put an Ñ in EN ESPAÑOL in the navigation bar entry for this feature, 2) position the language choice in the upper right section of the web page, which is where people have been trained to look for language information, and 3) make it work with the Firefox browser ("hay más a la vida que Microsoft" -- English to Spanish courtesy of Google MT, or on the return trip, "there is more to the life than Microsoft").

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