[Tower of Babel. From Logoi.com]

A while back, my friend  David Feng tweeted in Chinese that he was tweeting while riding under Beijing in a subway car.

I used Google Translate to see if I could figure out what he said. It came out something like “I’m using my digits on myself with a bird in the Beijing belly,” and he and I had a good laugh

I remembered that this morning I saw a few tweets with my name in them. Two were in Chinese and one in Arabic. I used Google Translate to try to read in English what was written in these two languages that I don’t speak.

The results were downright goofy and I have not a clue what had been written about me. I complained about it on Twitter and immediately a few people jumped to the defense of Google Translate and the Tweetdeck translation plug in. Mike Chelan,  argued that these plug ins are “a decent start.”

He’s right. They are a decent start. In some cases, particularly the Romance languages of French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, as well as German, the reults are pretty good. You can almost always get the gist of what was said, even if you often lose certain nuances, such as irony, sarcasm and humor.

But in other cases, Asian and Middle Eastern languages, the translations make very often make no sense whatsoever.

In fact, the problem is that computers don’t have any common sense. They have no feel for emotional or poetic flourishes. They trample on slang and metaphors and it is extremely difficult, it would seem to me, to be able to break these barriers, without having humans intervene in translation.

And humans are just not a very economic solution to the shortcomings of machine translation. I think it will remain a major challenge to get beyond the “decent start” we have made.

To me, this is an extremely important issue in social media. Translation is one of the great unresolved barriers.

Ultimately, my dream is for me to be able to post words in my own natural language, with the slang I use and the humor I sometimes try to infuse. Then you can read it in whatever your language is. You can respond using your language and I will then see it in my own.

This universal translation could allow people everywhere to talk with people everywhere. That direct human-to-human mode of conversation would not only be good for business and education, it wouyld also be good for world peace, or so it seems to me.

My hope is that somehow we can get beyond a “decent start,” as Mike called it.

http://globalneighbourhoods.net/2010/03/the-holy-grail-of-universal-translators.html