Blogtrek

Coja el alcohol!

The translator in Google seems tremendous. You put a web page or a text into a blank, select the type of translation, hit a button, and here! (or voilá!) the page or text in the other language. Babelfish has constructed this translator, which is also used on Alta Vista. But how good is it? It translates most everything OK but it still is a long way from producing fluent prose, and it may never get there. There are some egregious examples using it. For example, try "Catch the spirit!", which was a slogan of a Toastmaster district a few years ago. You get "Coja el alcohol!" and your thought is "Hey! Wrong kind of spirit(s)!" This was noticed by Leon Bloy of Argentina in his blog of last year, when he noticed that religious statements had hilarious or even sacrilegious translations into Spanish. For example, "holy spirit" translates into "alcohol santo". The holy liquor, I suppose. What's more, Sr. Bloy points out that Babelfish doesn't even know the Spanish word "santo". If you put that into Babelfish, from Spanish to English, you get "santo" and a comment that it can't be translated. And you get sentences like "Esta página está para el alcohol santo"; that is, "This page is for the holy alcohol." Sr. Bloy has many other egregious examples, and I refer you to his entertaining blog, which is written in Spanish. Babelfish has trouble with other languages as well. For example, I typed in once "planes or something" in an attempt to describe something in the sky. In Spanish I got "planos o algo", and in German I got "Flachen odor etwas." Apparently Babelfish thinks that planes in English are geometrical planes or two-dimensional manifolds, instead of airplanes. To get the latter, you have to say "airplane" and then Babelfish will give you "Flugzeuge".

No, Babelfish is helpful but don't try to converse with someone using it unless you edit it first. It's much worse than a spelling checker.