UPDATED 01:07 EDT / NOVEMBER 30 2015

NEWS

DANGER! Don’t get too attached to your online translator

I just finished reading the last story in the the sci-fi anthology Future Visions: Original Science Fiction Inspired by Microsoft, a book dedicated to Redmond’s aspirations and how they might play out in the next decade or two.

The story “Another Word for World,” written by award winning author Ann Leckie, takes Microsoft’s translating technology and puts it in a distant world that is a little bit too much like our own world. The inhabitants of this planet are having racially related problems, with the minority race struggling to maintain their stay under the graces of the majority. This isn’t helped by them not understanding each other’s language, while the “handhelds” used to translate their discord are about as useful as our real world’s Skype Translator and Google Translate.

In spite of some sketchy translations that almost lead to mortal combat, Leckie concludes her story with a rather far-fetched allusion to Microsoft technology almost providing world peace in a distant galaxy.

“Those handheld translators are a good thing. Can you imagine what the past hundred years would have been like without them?” says one person. The character adds that translation technology on the polarized planet prevented all sorts of problems, as if the misunderstanding of languages, ones that couldn’t be learned in a century, were the root of all the dark drama that exists between cultures.

Translate her

I told a friend who has recently gotten into a relationship with someone who speaks a foreign language not to rely on Bing translate when reading her and her friend’s messages on Facebook. He is handsome might translate clearly, but people rarely say such things, especially within the colloquially cagey comment boxes of social media. Non-cognate languages, especially when local parlance is being used, are almost impossible to decipher with Bing. You might as well ask the cat what she said. And this can be problematic when love is in its sometimes insecure early dawn.

I got right up to her, penetrating her very essence,” wrote he … and that was just talking about the iPhone help desk clerk.  Anyone who is bilingual will tell you that it’s probably better not to hit Bing translate when the reason is to attempt to understand the sentiments of another person. As impressive as translators might seem, when you consider the possible outcomes and attendant reactions to those outcomes, asking the Internet for a meaning at best might cause befuddlement, and at worst cause a rupture in the conjugal bed. There are times when it’s better to know nothing than know a little bit.

Leckie’s veiled claim that translators might be a reason why entire cultures haven’t been, or won’t be, vaporized is somewhat outlandish to say the least. Imagine Obama and Putin discussing Syria using Skype translation tools. Such a point is extreme, but it must be remembered that online translations have caused millions of little crises, all of which might have been prevented, or at least attenuated, had there been a warning sign above the translation tab that read: Enter At Your Own Risk; I Am Mostly Inaccurate.

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Language games

As the German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said, we don’t just speak another language, we are another language. Within our language there are many hidden, constantly changing games we play, so if you don’t know the rules, i.e., have a natural fluency, you can’t play the game. Translators are primitive; they don’t understand the rules of the game. The kind of technology that would be needed to understand the mindboggling nuances of language is hardly even a dream, more a fantasy. We might be a good bit closer to breaking the language barrier once we’ve solved P versus NP, but that’s not likely going to happen. Moreover, learning languages, rather than clicking on tabs, is an important acquisition. Understanding the rules of someone else’s game might help prevent some amount of global distress while enhancing awareness of the “other.”

There are views that Google’s statistical translation system, which uses the web to take words and phrases that have been translated before to give you the nearest translation, is something that can be progressed to near perfection. Google also has employed translators to do the laborious task of translating countless phrases. “Thousands of human translators working for the United Nations and the European Union and so forth have spent millions of hours producing precisely those pairings that Google Translate is now able to cherry-pick,” said this article in the New York Times that sits on the fence as to whether translation technology is good or bad in terms of its effectiveness. The fact is, it is what it is, quite useful when you need the bathroom in Spanish. Preventing war, connecting cultures, helping you do business in Bangladesh? We might need a million more hours of people hitting keys for that to happen; but just as monkeys will probably never write Shakespeare, Google will likely never properly translate.

The question is, as this writer put it for the Huffington Post on the translation problem and why computers will never have pragmatic competence – the ability to understand an intended meaning, “The bottom line is this: Computers will never fully solve the translation problem, and even to make micro-strides toward that audacious goal, they will need significant help from humans. The question isn’t, ‘Will we get there?’ but rather, ‘How far will we get, and how fast?'”

The be all and end all (translate that!) is that until translation technology can work efficiently, we should probably leave it alone if we are trying to socialize or conduct serious business. Showcasing the technology as “connecting the world” is a delusion of grandeur; it might better come under the slogan, ‘Confusing the World.’ And if you believe in language games, there’s a kind of paradox that can be invoked too: The more it connects us – and we forgo learning a language – the less we understand of the other person/culture. Its success would lead to cultural homogeneity, and we don’t want that to happen. That being said, the technology can be helpful when learning another language.

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Be careful with my patois; it’s sensitive

Using translation technology to buy apples or find the bathroom might work, and it’s nice to know a quick search can provide the answers you need, but then common phrase translations of distant languages have been around for quite some time. The limitations of translation tech also circumscribes real-time translate, which at its most powerful could maybe, perhaps, get you through a minute of a very basic Yes and No game with your Chinese Facebook friend.

Translation technology has provided us with a quick and easy way to find the meaning of some of these phrases when we need them. It’s good at that, and we can commend those that have made it possible. But there doesn’t seem to be much evidence of bringing “people together from all over the world,” as Skype will have you know.

The problem with marketing translation technology as bringing us closer together is that it is trying to be something it isn’t: It’s a grandiose guidebook of common phrases, not a language barrier breaking technology. Bing is not magic; it can’t turn argot into literal meaning and could even be quite offensive when let loose on a benign idiom. Suck it, and see.

When invited to envisage a world of future technology after looking around Microsoft’s labs, all Leckie could come up with was Skype translate on another planet. The reason she didn’t conjure up something more otherworldly was probably because Microsoft doesn’t really have a (language) game plan yet. Can we imagine what the last hundred years would have been like without computer translation tools? The answer is “Yes, we can.” Can we imagine what computer translation tools will be doing in a hundred years? No, we can’t. If, or when, translations are perfect, will we be more connected? Or will we be just as culturally alienated to each other while being able to discuss football and Immanuel Kant – without understanding a single word our interlocutor said? That would have been the premise of my Microsoft story.

Photo credit: Kevin Gessner and Chris Radley via Flickr

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