Do You Want Poetry or Gobbledygook in Your Multilanguage Translations?

What is plain language use in one language can become poetry – or gobbledygook - in another. Gossip, arrows, airplanes, and time can fly. But preferably not in the same sentence.

Advertising text relies heavily on ambiguities and metaphor, which need to be translated on two levels - linguistic and cultural. Humans excel at sorting through ambiguities in their own language to get to what the writer intended to say. Machine translation software simply can’t do that.

Meaning depends on context
The computer is supposed to "understand" what the source text means, and computers have never been good at this, maybe for the simple reason that nobody really knows what understanding is.

Meaning often depends on context. If we come across a sentence such as Time flies like an arrow in a soap opera or during a philosophical debate, we wouldn't hesitate to construe it as a statement about the nature of time.

The same sentence, when uttered in a science fiction movie about entities called time flies -- a type of fly that flies across time -- would become a statement about what these time flies like (they just happen to like arrows).

Finally, if the sentence is heard in a conversation taking place in a microbiology lab where various experiments with flies are taking place, we might have to interpret it as having something to do about a certain method of timing flies.

Grammatical exercise
Grammatically, this exercise means that the language user is supposed to decide instantly whether time is a verb, a noun qualifying another noun, or the subject or the sentence; likewise, whether like is a verb or a preposition.

Translation software, when facing such ambiguities, relies on its internal memory of common sentence patterns based on their probability. Therefore, the above sentence will be always translated according to the first interpretation -- i.e. as a metaphorical assertion on the nature of time.

Literal vs literate translation
Because machine translation software tends to "read" English sentences according to the Subject-Verb-Object pattern, it is difficult, if not impossible for it to correctly construe metaphors or other uses of language that depend on playing tricks with the language itself (such as poetry).

The very sentence Time flies..., by stating that time "flies" employs a metaphor for the time flow that might not be that common in other languages.

At SRF Global Translations, we are devoted primarily to translations of multilanguage marketing materials and campaigns. Exact, localized, certified, natural language translations are crucial to our multinational clients. That’s why we rely on literate humans to create nuanced multilanguage translations.

07-Jun-2006 By Ardian