Website shows bad automated translations: a hoot!

[Anymouse]

This could be a fun site (Cheating Translator, link below). It runs phrases through various Internet translating services and then translates them back, for several languages, looking for bad translation. And the folk that translated the Bible didn’t even have this good of a tool.

For example: when I translated the phrase “To be or not to be: that is the question,” in Simplified and Traditional Chinese, and Croatian, it came back as “To be or not to be: that is the problem.”

I had to try one more. As a former Aviation Electronics Technician in the Navy (since retired from epilepsy), I had to try a “scientific” phrase: one you might think could not be easily fouled up by such a translator, as scientific language is usually very precise.

So I went to the Website “Britney Spears Guide to Laser Semiconductor Physics” ( http://www.britneyspears.ac ) and “cut-and-paste” a small section on the definition of an insulating material, to see what I would get.

I cut from her Website (actually, she runs it with a physicist on Ascension Island; she lends her name and photos to the educational site with the idea that science is boring because it is not sexy in the usual sense, and has a blog there, and on-line Britney-bling store) the following phrase:

“It is a popular belief that insulators do not conduct electricity because their valence electrons are not free to wander throughout the material.”

I got: “The prevailing opinion is that the electrical insulators, such as the valence electrons are not free to move material.”

There is quite a bit of difference between “opinion” and “belief”, and “moving through material” and “moving material.” Also, the translation implies that the valence electrons are electrical insulators, when in fact they are the source of electrical current in a material. And that is only one sentence.

Internet translation services are useful for reading foreign Web pages and documents and such, but are not entirely accurate.

This could be fun. And after countless translations of the Bible, with no such technological tools, Christians still think the KJV is the accurate and unerring Word of God. At least in Islam it is said that you cannot properly read the Koran unless you read it in Arabic (the language it was written in), because of this exact problem.

If you try this site out, post your silly translations to this thread. And try to imagine 1,400 or so pages of the Bible being translated, repeatedly, over hundreds of years, and no errors creeping in.

James.
http://www.cheatingtranslators.com/bad-translator

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I had to try one more:
I entered the first sentence on the Cheating Translator's page and ran it through all 56 translators:

Start ... "Machine translations are useful for getting a general idea about what text written in a foreign language means."
End ..... "The concept of language development."
James.