Skip to main content

A funny sad story...

I've been hearing a lot about pluses and minuses of machine translation lately. I had some discussions with a person who strongly believes in machine translation and its quality. I also met some other people who honestly believe that professional translators think too highly of themselves and their skills while in reality it's a simple job that can easily be done with the help of some software.
Then last week I came across an article about a recent scandal in the Web connected with machine translation. Guess which organization tried to use it to translate its website? You won't believe it. It was Russian Academy of Sciences. Nobody knows how it happened that this institution chose to use machine translation (or hired a "professional" who used it). The result of this "work" was instantly noticed by bloggers all over the web.Some pearls include: the Squirrel Institute (instead of Institute of Protein Research), Botanic sad-institute of wounds (it should be Botanical Garden-Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences), Institute of organic chemistry of them. N of D of Zelinskogo (it should be Institute of organic chemistry named after N. D. Zelinsky) and other things. I haven't laughed so much for ages. But at the same time I felt so bad for our Academy of sciences and for other clever people who seriously think that our job is so simple that it can be easily done by a machine. Why can't they understand that a software is good only when we just want to get an overall understanding of a text in an unknown language, but it can never understand and translate all the nuances, can't feel the emotions and can't grasp the meaning of polysemantic words. In other words, a machine can never feel a language like a human being can.
What can I say? I feel so sad. Hope the Academy of Sciences in your country doesn't do the same mistake and respects the profession of a translator. Because if the Academy of Sciences doesn't do that, how can we expect ordinary people to value professional translators?

This post was made based on this article.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

10 interesting facts about the Russian language

In my previous post  I promised to follow with the  interesting info about some other languages. So here are 10 facts about the Russian language which might be of interest to those who are studying it. If you would like to have this list in Russian, please contact me and I will send it to you by email. So, what do I find interesting about my native language? 1. Russian has about 500,000 words, but only 2,000-2,500 of them are used frequently. 100 most frequently used words make 20% of all written and oral speech. A high school graduate's vocabulary usually has 1,500 to 4,000 words. Those who have graduated from a higher educational institution normally have a richer vocabulary consisting of approximately  8,000 words. 2. It's compulsory for all astronauts in the international space station to learn Russian, so we can call it an international language of space :)

15 interesting facts about the English language

I prepared this list for one of my English classes. And then it dawned on me that I can share it with you, too! So here are 15 facts about the English language that I find very interesting. Hope you do, too ;) Rudyard Kipling was fired as a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner. His dismissal letter said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Kipling, but you just don't know how to use the English language. This isn't a kindergarten for amateur writers." No language has more synonyms than English.

Translation Forum Russia 2017: my report

A few days ago I came back from Translation Forum Russia which took place in Ufa, Bashkortostan . My daughter Delia went with me because she never visited Ufa before (neither have I) and because of the trip to the Southern Ural mountains we planned to take after the conference with a small group of colleagues. Ufa is not considered one of the primary tourist attractions of Russia, though I am convinced now that it definitely should be. Some pictures of the city (not all of the pictures are mine, some were made by the official photographer of the conference Elena Ekaterininskaya, our company CEO Fedor Kondratovich and some other colleagues): The bee is a symbol of the region as Bashkortostan produces the best honey in Russia. We saw installations shown below in different parts of the city. There were still covered because of the cold weather, but they will be full of blooming flowers as soon as the warm weather comes. The bee as we saw it That's what it