Google's guide to the galaxy

Don't bother to learn foreign languages, advises the Daily Mail. Google says it plans to launch smartphones that will translate for you in real time. Franz Och, Google's head of translation services, admits that speech will be an even tougher challenge than text, and linguistics guru David Crystal agrees the problems of dealing with speed of speech and range of accents could prove insurmountable. So don't hold your breath. It's just a case of iPad envy.

Unfortunately for professional translators (or in this case interpreters), Google's latest gambit adds to the popular perception that effective communication is a question of terabytes and algorithms.

Don't forget the Babel Fish in Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - a small yellow creature capable of translating any language when placed in a person's ear - sparked a bloody war because everyone became able to understand what other people were saying.

Buzz off Google. Get over yourselves.

Is Jeromobot a hobgoblin?

Lifelong terminology evangelist Steve Dyson concedes that terminological consistency – one of the major selling points of translation environment tools – may be overrated after all. “For sizeable chunks of the translation industry, including translators of technical journalism and marketing materials, terminological consistency (TermCon) is culturally alien and stylistically unacceptable,” he says.

“TermCon receives little more than lip service from journalists writing in English and is often seen as a failing by journalists writing in other languages,” says Steve. In French journalism, for example, the quest for ‘elegant variation’ often takes precedence over the kind of ‘foolish consistency’ that translation memory tools tend to promote. “It’s another example of how technology can unleash powerful tools on people who simply don’t have the training, experience or cultural sensitivity to use them professionally.”

Steve will be running a workshop on translating technical journalism at the Tradulínguas conference in Lisbon in May. His 2007 paper on the same topic can be acccessed here.

2010: Year of the Purge

Jost Zetzsche, a leading proponent of translation environment tools (TeNTs), wrote an enlightening piece about his experience in Accurapid's Translation Journal last month.

As his personal translation memory grew and grew, Jost found its usefulness "seemed to decline rather than improve. Too much time had passed between the earlier projects and the current ones (...), language had changed and my skill levels had, too." Gradually, he found he was spending "a lot of time deleting or wading through useless suggestions from the TM." With the newer TeNTs offering subsegment as well as segment matching, the problems were getting even worse.

His conclusion? Gigantic vaults of bilingual data are fantastic as reference materials, "but I am just not sure about their value as translation memory data in the classic sense." My conclusion: this is the year to purge the dross building up in our own bilingual resources, such as wobbly source texts and translations the client didn't like (yes, this happens!). Our resources may be carefully vetted, but they're never vetted carefully enough!

And hats off to Jost Zetzsche for his realistic analysis in a world obsessed by the power of the crowd and the value of the terabyte.

You align it!

Terminotix, makers of the LogiTerm TM tool and (more to the point) the excellent alignment engine AlignFactory, launched this free web service a few months ago. It uses the same algorithms as AlignFactory, which will also be included with the 2010 update of LogiTerm.

There's probably no better alignment tool on the market. In the free version you can't edit the bitexts, but for rough-and-ready alignment it can't be beat.

And what happens to the files you just aligned on the Terminotix servers? Back in August when the service launched, the Canadian company's (excellent) customer service said "All files are deleted as soon as you close YouAlign. We will soon be indicating that procedure on the Web site so that our clients know what happens to the files." Sure enough, tucked away in the sign-up page, the privacy policy now says this in black and white, so there's every reason to trust them not to feed our confidential data into the mother of all translation memories... or sell it to Google!