Posts Tagged ‘machine translation’
Stir-Fried Wikipedia
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.” Read more machine translation blunders in the article [...]
Get Out of Jail Free with Google Mistranslation
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 [...]
Google Translate has great uses, disastrous misuses
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 [...]
Do Not Assume Everyone Understands Basic Principles of Translation
"...just because someone in a company understands how to avoid the risks of producing bad translation does not mean everyone in a company does. Someone else — someone whose job description is not even supposed to include translation — may not know it is inappropriate to run your marketing collateral through a free online translator. Even the [...]
Preserving Brand Strength in Global Markets by Following a Few Simple Steps
...Aribex is a Utah-based company that understands the importance of preserving its brand message in translation. Aribex efforts in multiple market segments are geared toward being "the worldwide leader in handheld X-ray." The latest models in the company’s NOMAD® product line are sleek, lightweight and uniquely positioned in the market. [...]
Garbage In, Garbage Out
The axiom "garbage in, garbage out," abbreviated GIGO, applies to translation in a number of ways. As illustrated by the following example from "Machine translation can bring blunders, successes in international business," it is worth the time to ensure translation glossaries, translation style guides, translation memory databases, and also [...]
Bing notranslate: Preventing Automatic Translation by Microsoft
If your company website has already been localized or if you plan to localize it into other languages, you will want to ensure that your clients see that high quality human translation, not the machine translation provided by Google... or Microsoft. Likewise, you will want to always prevent translation of certain text, code, product names, [...]
Machine Translation Gisting
99% of the time when companies request machine translation, they actually need high quality human translation. However, there are instances in which a quick and dirty machine translation can be very useful and appropriate. ...when users merely need to understand the "gist" of a document, machine translation can provide low-quality translations [...]
Machine translation can bring blunders, successes in international business
In 2008, a Chinese restaurant displayed a bilingual sign above its storefront to accommodate English-speaking patrons. To save a few ennies in creating the sign, someone working for the restaurant skipped use of a professional human translation. Instead, the restaurateur typed the restaurant name into a machine translation program, which [...]
Youtube Subtitle Translation
Youtube recently combined automatic translation with its automatic captioning feature. Automatic voice recognition technology is not 100 percent accurate. So, when that inaccurate technology is combined with inaccurate machine translation, you may sometimes see laughable errors much like those that result from playing the telephone game (also [...]
