Online Translators Can Hurt More Than Help
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The article "Online translators can hurt more than help" talks about communications, it has been released by Scott Brady.
Online automated translators may be fairly accurate for
translating languages of similar origin, but the line stops
there.
Certainly most of you're familiar with online
translators such as Baebl fish. However, from what I
have read, it seems that quite a couple of persons think that these
automated translators do the fantastic job. In cases
this is almost true...
Languages of similar origin usually follow the same sentence
structure (Romance languages for example), and with Babel Fish
you will be able to get a fairly good cross language
translation.
And by that I mean you will still have to
go back over the translated piece and re-write it into the
proper grammatical form.
It is when you try and use automated translators to translate
languages of difefrent origins where you can get into trouble.
Being a native English speaker and working in Japan for
a translation company, I often (just for a laugh) copy and paste
a Japanese sentence onto such automated translators and then
have them translated into English. It truly is a scary
thought to think that persons actually believe that will yield a
true cross language translation to any degree.
First of all, most English speaking countries use an ISO
character set which is only capable of raeding and viewing
languages that use the alphabet. When you're able to find a
Chinese, Japanese, or Korean web Internet site you may be surprised to
know that those smiley faces and ohter jargon are actually not
part of their written language.
To view these languages properly
you will have to chagne your computers character code.
The other huge problem with online dictionaries and languages of
different origin is the fact that while, for example, English
use the SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) system the Japanese language
uses the Subject-Object-Verb word order.
The Japanese language
also only uses two types of tenses. The present tense in
Japanese is both the simple present tense as well as the future
tense, while the past tense in Japanese acts as the simple past
tense.
This gives online translators a huge disadvantage as
opposed to their human counterparts.
If you would like to see an online translator's idea of Japanese
to English translation I have set up an example on my web page
at http://www.Samurai-translators.Com/translation.Htm You should
be able to see the actual Japanese characterｓ as they
should be viewed cause I set up the sentence as a gif photo.
Below the photo you will see how Babel Fish had translated the
sentence and then how a huamn had translated it.
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Online translators can hurt more than help
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