The Sun Still doesn’t shine on Google Translate

You don’t have to work in a language field to know that machine translation still stinks. It improved for a while, and then it bogged down, and hasn’t ever really progressed from there. You would have to ask someone who knows more about the software involved and the industry itself to cite the specific whys and wherefores behind the lack of progress. All I personally know is that machine translation has a long way to go before it puts anyone out of business, at least in the general society. I don’t doubt that great tools exist for machine translation, but so far they haven’t reached that sweet spot in terms of price, access, and ease of interface that would cause some kind of revolution, where you would see people, say, walking around with earbud-looking devices that allow everyone wearing such a headset to be understood in Esperanto or English regardless of what language they’re actually speaking. The best that’s done now for world leaders and bigwigs at various summits is to have wireless and discrete devices in their ears through which a (human) interpreter makes (imperfect) on-the-fly interpretations from the Source Language to the Target Language. And we’ve had that kind of technology in the modern world for a long, long time already, relatively speaking.
I know this kind of on-the-spot stuff pays well and is appreciated, but I also am aware of its deficiencies due to my time A) in the military B) as a boxing fan. The two go hand-in-hand since there are tons of soldiers who’ve taken the Defense Language Aptitude Battery and even gone to the Language Institute in Monterey Bay, California, and there are a ton of boxing fans in the Army (and the fights are broadcast on slight delays for free on the Armed Forces Network).
I had a Puerto Rican friend in the Army who was a trilingual and a boxing fan who absolutely hated Jerry Olaya, the guy who did post-fight translation for Hispanic boxers who didn’t speak English on HBO.
“He’s not translating the guy’s answer correctly!”
I remember during one between-round translation where a fighter (Ricardo Mayorga, maybe?) was stunned by the power of his foe, and Olaya translated his banter with his cornerman as “Man, that black guy hits hard.” My guess is that the fighter’s specific phrasing wasn’t so delicate, but where is the interpreter’s responsibility weighted in such situations? To the fidelity of the translation or toward avoiding causing offense (or hell, a riot) in a situation where he’s working on the fly with a guy who’s known to insult and degrade his opponents to the point that things might spiral out of control?
I still have quite a lot of work to do before I even get conversant in Spanish. I’m pretty good with German, though.
Obviously, as someone who works sometimes as a freelance translator and who spent a few years in earnest trying to learn the German language (no American ever really and truly learns German; see Mark Twain’s essay on the German Language) I’m relieved that we have not seen the rise of the bilingual robots with super cochlear transistors, at least not in wide use (they could be waiting in the sewers, planning their linguistic takeover of the “wet tongues” or whatever derogatory term they have for us).
Still, just to assuage my fears, I’ll still occasionally check out the software. Not the cutting edge stuff, mind you, but the kind of stuff in wide use, like Google Translate.
There’s a pretty good test I use based on one of the first little bits of wordplay our professor taught us in a 101 course. Die Sonne scheint zu scheinen . The word Scheinen is a homonym that means both “to shine” or “to seem” in German. Sonne means “sun.” Thus anyone with a brain (which still excludes machine translation software) sees the German sentence as “The sun seems to shine.” The software still sees this as something like “The sun shines” or “The sun seems,” depending, I guess, on what kind of mood it’s in that day.
I’ll keep checking with Google Translate to see if they ever fix this problem.
Until then, your jobs are still safe for the time being, you filthy meat bags.