Online translation on the rise, changing lives
Phone apps, websites help to lower language barriers
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — You might use Google Translate to read a hardto-find Manga comic book or to decipher an obscure recipe for authentic Polish blintzes.
Or, like Phillip and Niki Smith in rural Mississippi, you could use it to rescue a Chinese orphan at the same time.
Google is now doing a record billion translations on any given day, as much text as you’d find in 1 million books for everything from understanding school lunch menus to gathering national security intelligence.
It translates in 65 languages, from Afrikaans to Yiddish, and can be used on websites, with speech recognition and as an app on mobile phones even if there is no connection.
While the technology is exponentially evolving, Google’s translation guru Franz Och’s face lit up when he heard that the Smiths and their new daughter, 14-year-old Guan Ya, are settling into their new lives together this month communicating almost exclusively through Google Translate.
“All day long I look at algorithms, algorithms and algorithms,” he said.
“It is so rewarding to hear that it is touching lives.”
In the Smiths’ case, it changed theirs forever.
Adoption deadline
The Smiths, who already had three children, first spotted Guan Ya less than a year ago when Niki Smith was looking at photos online of hard-to-place orphans, offering simple prayers for them one by one. She had no intention of adding to her family. Then she saw Guan Ya. “She was just our daughter,” said Smith of that chance Internet encounter nearly a year ago. “There was no doubt about it, from the first time we saw her on the Internet.”
There were seemingly impossible obstacles to adopting the girl. First, Guan Ya was months away from turning 14, the age at which Chinese law would make her ineligible for adoption. Not only could Guan Ya not speak English, she didn’t speak at all. Guan Ya is deaf. Undeterred, the Smiths scrambled through the paperwork and home studies that are inherent to international adoptions. With support from Chinese and U.S. authorities, they expedited the bureaucracy by running a flurry of emails and forms through online translators. And one day Smith received an email from her daughter-to-be, an unintelligible jumble of Chinese characters.
“Well, I couldn’t begin to read this letter,” Smith said.
That is where Google Translate came into play. Smith cut and pasted the letter into the empty rectangle for the program in her Internet browser and Guan Ya’s thoughts appeared.
Math problem
Machine translation dates back to the end of World War II, when coders realized that cryptography and deciphering were, in part, math problems. In 1949, influential scientist Warren Weaver laid out a pivotal proposition that paved the way for today’s computational linguistics: a theorem could be developed to solve the logical structure of languages.
Yet almost 65 years since Weaver wrote that “it seems likely that the problem of translation can be attacked successfully,” machine translation is far from perfect.
A team of South African researchers at the Matieland Language Centre recently published a study comparing documents translated between Afrikaans and English by professional translators and then by Google Translate.
The results even close.
For the machine-translated writings, “the quality was still below average, and the texts would require extensive post-editing for their function to be met,” they found.
“The general public thinks you can stick anything into machine translation and it’s going to give you everything you need,
weren’t but of course that’s not the case,” said Jamie Lucero, who heads the translation and interpretation program at Bellevue College in Bellevue, Wash.
He said for high quality translations, literature, marketing materials or complex syntax, a human translator is still essential.
But machines are helpful, he said, “for people who just want to get a basic message across.”