Not long ago, Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, announced
that his company was going to offer “real-time” foreign language translation in
its Skype videoconferencing service. You speak German, I hear in English. And
vice versa.
The new Skype software will use capabilities built into the
Bing search engine.
Now, I don’t use Bing. I mean, the kids tell me Internet
Explorer and Bing are for the geriatric set and I’m not quite ready for the
nursing home. But I do use the Google equivalent a lot and, well, I’d have to
say I find Microsoft’s idea a little unnerving. Or, as Google Translate, after
a quick trip through Romanian and Bulgarian then back to English would render
it, “mi dress idea irritating peak.”
Is Bing better at translating? Let’s see how it does with a fairer
exercise in a more common language, French.
In a story about one of the many, many sex scandals of the
politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a particularly convoluted episode that involved
prostitutes, Masons, and more at the Carlton Hotel in Lille, Bing has a man “admitting
having worked in clothes only once in ten years.”
Anything’s possible in DSK’s world, but a careful
human-based translation says the man was just agreeing he wasn’t an active
Mason and hadn’t worn his robes much.
Here’s a fun Bing from a Bulgarian politician. Starting with
an original that’s something like: “It’s painful for us to hear
about the impoverished pensioners, the poor mothers, the [economic] misery
that’s sweeping our land,” Bing gives us, “To pain I listen to us for
poor seniors, for the paucity of motherly, misery, swept the country.” The
Google version is just as funny.
It’s hard to have an overall computer
translation favorite, but this one, by Google from a Korean language cell phone
review a few years back, is tough to beat:
“Being frank more, more when it tries to talk, it
leans against you in the land of the product which is Samsung also there is
different mysterious expectation. Like all things to in gear composition and
Samsung SPH m4300 which degree is big in PDA market, hoyk with the product
which it draws it is visible with the polyvalent opinion thing. Of course at
the degree where the reaction of the market against hereupon will correspond in
him hot thing authorization also is an unknown….”
Now, I don’t know a word of Korean, but I’ll bet if the
author of the review reads English he’d see things in there he didn’t write. He
might feel that the software was suffering from, how shall I say it, a paucity
of motherlys?
Google recently announced that it too is going into “real-time
communication.”
As the American titans of technology approach this new
frontier, one might be a little worried. Think about an international visitor
renting a Google self-driving car at the Lille airport and telling it what to
do via Google Translate:
Visitor from Korea [in Korean]: Take me to the Carlton Hotel!
Google Self-Drive Car [Replying in Korean]: Hey Sexy lady! Going to be working in
clothes?
Or, as the big 797 comes in for a landing, conversations could
go something like this:
Pilot [speaking in Korean]: “Lower the landing
gear!”
Co-pilot [hearing in English via Bing Translator]:
“Mysterious expectation in him hot thing?”
Now that I think of it, that nursing home is likely to be a
lot safer than the brave new world of computer translation. I can Skype the
family from there.
In the meantime, I have to admit that after reading a while
English this kind, you start yourself doing it too. So, Googlers and Softies,
the translation work keep up. For posterity it do. Really. Grandchildren your
will think funny also. But give up the day job not. That’s my polyvalent
opinion thing. I couldn’t being frank more.
