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Google Translate and other free online translation tools can be great for instant, informal translation. When expectations are properly set, particularly for low-value text, unedited machine translation can be quite useful. However, when a user overestimates machine translation capabilities, the results can be confusing at best.
When one online machine translation tool apparently mistranslated a common Chinese word as “Wikipedia,” Chinese menus began popping up everywhere with English translations for menu items like “stir-fried Wikipedia" and “barbecued Congo eel with Wikipedia and fermented bean curd.” Though odd, the error is relatively harmless. However, when the text has important implications in law, finance or marketing, the results can be terribly costly.
Potential customers reading marketing materials may get the gist of a translation, but successful marketing text usually needs to convey more than just a general idea. Wayne Bourland, a senior manager on Dell’s global localization team, noted, in a recent usability study conducted in Germany, Dell observed that… "buyers who needed to form an emotional connection as part of the purchasing process were both distracted and disappointed by translation errors.”
When a Moscow-based marketing firm asked my company to review some previously translated marketing Web pages, we had to tell the company it paid a lot of money for what was actually a very crude machine translation. If this marketing company and its clients had expected machine translation, the news would have been acceptable. Unfortunately, the firm and its customers were expecting high-quality translations that captured the nuances of the original marketing text. The need to pay for a complete retranslation by professional human translators was a bitter pill to swallow.
In a 2010 legal mishap, “a Russian trucker in (the Netherlands) involved in a bar brawl was released because the (court) summons he received was poorly translated from Dutch into Russian using Google Translate,” reported the Dutch-English news blog 24oranges. Instead of reading, “you are to appear in court on 3 August 2010,” as it should have, the summons said something more like “you have to avoid being in court on 3 August 2010.”
This column has previously mentioned many other incidents resulting from improper use of machine translation. A Chinese restaurant sign displayed the words “Translate Server Error” above its storefront after a free translation site failed. A newspaper mistranslation repeatedly misquoted a former president of Kazakhstan as referring to the important issue of “passing gas.” Israeli journalists nearly sparked an international incident when they seemed to insult a Dutch diplomat’s mother in a machine-translated message. Finally, an automatically translated furniture tag contained a racist slur that seriously offended customers in Toronto, Canada.
What differentiates the merely humorous from the cringe-worthy are often the value of the text undergoing translation coupled with readers’ quality expectations. Informal instant-messaging conversations or user-generated content in social media is of relatively low value, so translation errors result in minimal repercussions for even the most horrendous mistranslations. By contrast, legal contracts, financial reports, marketing collateral and application user interfaces usually include text of much higher value that should be translated by human professionals. Text of intermediate value may support a quality level between the two, if the expectations of both the customer and vendor are set appropriately.
When Canadian hockey fans expected quality translation from the French shopping website of their Olympic hockey team, they were sorely disappointed. Machine translation errors irked many visitors, and the team shut down that e-commerce section of the website, foregoing the potential revenue stream.
In contrast, when someone intentionally uses machine translation to simply get the “gist” of a document, and when the alternative to that low-quality translation is no translation at all, they are not nearly so disappointed by the results. When machine translation’s limitations are understood and anticipated, such automatic solutions can be successfully implemented to translate large knowledge bases of user-generated help documentation. Automatic translation can even help facilitate some casual, low-value conversations that would not usually justify an interpreter.
In other cases, legal, financial and political workers are able to comb through enormous volumes of machine translated files — translated behind firewalls using secure systems, not free online tools — to identify key words and select the most pertinent and critical documents, which are then forwarded for higher-quality human translation.
These principles are even understood by Google and other companies that build and market machine translation products. Yes, Google has built an impressive statistical machine translation system, but the search giant involves human professionals to translate higher-value content.
These tips may seem like common sense, but we should not assume everyone “gets it.” As I was so painfully reminded earlier this year, everyone in the content production process must understand the basic capabilities and limitations of machine translation. Unedited, low-cost machine translation can be excellent for translating low-value text and providing the general idea to people who only expect the “gist.” For texts of greater value and for audiences with higher expectations, professional human translation will help companies avoid translation blunders and their costly consequences.
Adam Wooten is director of translation services at Lingotek. He also teaches a course on translation technology at BYU. E-mail: awooten@lingotek.com . Follow him on Twitter at AdamWooten..
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对于即时，非正式翻译作业来说，谷歌翻译和其他免费在线翻译工具大有用处。如果期望值不高，尤其是对低价值文字，未经编辑的机器翻译可能非常有用。然而，当用户过高估机器翻译的功能，其结果就不止文字混乱那么简单了。
一个在线机器翻译工具显然将一个普通的中国词“鸡枞”误译成“维基百科”，英文翻译的中国菜单铺天盖地而来，如“爆炒维基百科”和“叉烧刚果鳗鱼与维基百科和腐乳。”虽然不知所云，其错误尚无大碍，但是，当涉及到具有重要影响的法律，财务或营销文本时，其结果可能是极其可怕的昂贵。
潜在客户在阅读营销材料时可能会得到翻译的要点，但成功的营销文本通常需要不仅仅是传达一个总体观念。戴尔公司全球本地化团队的高管-韦恩•博尔兰在德国进行的最近的一项可用性研究中就指出，戴尔注意到... ...“购买者在采购过程中还需建立一种情感连接，他们让翻译错误搞得既困惑又失望”。
当莫斯科的营销公司要求我公司审查一些以前翻译的营销网络页面时，我们不得不告诉该公司他们为实际上非常蹩脚的机器翻译支付了很多冤枉钱。如果这家营销公司及其客户宁愿用机器翻译，这消息本来也可接受。遗憾的是，该公司及其客户都曾期待得到能体现原有营销文本精髓的高质量翻译。需要支付专业翻译人员彻底推倒重译的费用对他们来说不啻是一味难以下咽的苦果。
在2010年的一起法律事故中，“一个参与酒吧斗殴的俄罗斯卡车司机（在荷兰）被释放，因为他收到的（法院）传票是用谷歌翻译从荷兰语滥译成俄文” - 荷兰语-英语新闻博客24oranges报道。传票本应读为，“你必须于2010年8月3日出庭，”但它读起来更像是“你必须避免于2010年8月3日出庭。”
本专栏先前也曾提到过由于不当使用机器翻译所造成的许多其他事件。由于免费翻译网站出现故障，一个中国餐馆店面上就挂上了写有“翻译服务器错误”字样的标牌。报纸误译多次错误地引用哈萨克斯坦前总统将“过境天然气”这一重要问题说成是“放屁（passing gas）”。以色列记者一篇机器翻译的消息似乎侮辱了一位荷兰外交官的母亲，差点引发国际事件。最后，一个自动翻译的家具标签包含有种族主义的污辱语言，彻底惹恼了加拿大多伦多的客户。
单纯的幽默之所以有别于阿谀奉承，往往体现的就是根据读者的质量预期所翻译文本的价值。非正式的即时消息对话或社交媒体用户生成的内容相对价值较低，因此即使是最可怕的误译，翻译错误也不会产生多么大的影响。相比之下，法律合同，财务报表，营销材料和应用程序用户界面的文本通常具有较高的价值，应当由人类专业人员进行翻译。中间值的文本可能会支持介于两者间的质量水平，当然还需客户和供应商提前设定好其期望值。
加拿大冰球球迷期望从其奥林匹克冰球队的法语购物网站看到高的质量翻译，然而他们大失所望。机器翻译中的错误激怒了许多游客，团队不得不关闭其网站中的电子商务部分，其潜在收入来源也付之东流。
相反，当有人故意利用机器翻译只是想了解一份文件的“要点”，低质量翻译的替代品简直就算不上翻译，然而他们对这样的结果并不感多么的失望。如果你可以理解并接受机器翻译的局限性，那就完全可以利用这样的自动解决方案，对用户生成的帮助文档中大量基本知识信息进行翻译。自动翻译甚至还可以帮助进行某些随意而低价值的交谈，这种交谈通常不需借助口头翻译。
在另外一些情况下，法律，金融和政治工作者能够梳理那些由有防火墙保护的系统，不是免费在线工具所翻译出来的机器翻译文件中的大量信息，并找出其关键词，从而选出最切题和最重要的文件，然后再转给更高质量的人力翻译处理。
甚至谷歌和其他一些建立和推销机器翻译产品的公司也能理解这些原则。是的，谷歌已经建立了一个令人印象深刻的统计式机器翻译系统，但这个搜索巨头同样利用人类专业人员来翻译高价值的内容。
这些技巧可能看起来像些常识，但我们不要认为大家都“理解它。”今年早些时候，我突然痛苦地意识到，内容制作过程中的每个人都必须了解机器翻译的基本能力和局限性。未经编辑，低成本的机器翻译在翻译低价值的文字，为那些只想了解“要点”的人们提供总体观念方面具有出色的可用性。但对于更高价值的文本，对于抱有更高期望值的受众而言，专业人力翻译才能帮助企业避免严重的翻译失误和代价高昂的后果。
亚当•伍滕是Lingotek的翻译服务总监。他还在杨百翰大学教授一门翻译技术课程。电子邮件：awooten@lingotek.com。 在Twitter上（AdamWooten）关注他..
原文链接：http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705371107/Google-Translate-has-great-uses-disastrous-misuses.html?pg=3
