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Google Translate and other free online translation tools can be great for instant, informal translation. When expectations are properly set, particularly for low-value text, unedited machine translation can be quite useful. However, when a user overestimates machine translation capabilities, the results can be confusing at best.
When one online machine translation tool apparently mistranslated a common Chinese word as “Wikipedia,” Chinese menus began popping up everywhere with English translations for menu items like “stir-fried Wikipedia" and “barbecued Congo eel with Wikipedia and fermented bean curd.” Though odd, the error is relatively harmless. However, when the text has important implications in law, finance or marketing, the results can be terribly costly.
Potential customers reading marketing materials may get the gist of a translation, but successful marketing text usually needs to convey more than just a general idea. Wayne Bourland, a senior manager on Dell’s global localization team, noted, in a recent usability study conducted in Germany, Dell observed that… "buyers who needed to form an emotional connection as part of the purchasing process were both distracted and disappointed by translation errors.”
When a Moscow-based marketing firm asked my company to review some previously translated marketing Web pages, we had to tell the company it paid a lot of money for what was actually a very crude machine translation. If this marketing company and its clients had expected machine translation, the news would have been acceptable. Unfortunately, the firm and its customers were expecting high-quality translations that captured the nuances of the original marketing text. The need to pay for a complete retranslation by professional human translators was a bitter pill to swallow.
In a 2010 legal mishap, “a Russian trucker in (the Netherlands) involved in a bar brawl was released because the (court) summons he received was poorly translated from Dutch into Russian using Google Translate,” reported the Dutch-English news blog 24oranges. Instead of reading, “you are to appear in court on 3 August 2010,” as it should have, the summons said something more like “you have to avoid being in court on 3 August 2010.”
This column has previously mentioned many other incidents resulting from improper use of machine translation. A Chinese restaurant sign displayed the words “Translate Server Error” above its storefront after a free translation site failed. A newspaper mistranslation repeatedly misquoted a former president of Kazakhstan as referring to the important issue of “passing gas.” Israeli journalists nearly sparked an international incident when they seemed to insult a Dutch diplomat’s mother in a machine-translated message. Finally, an automatically translated furniture tag contained a racist slur that seriously offended customers in Toronto, Canada.
What differentiates the merely humorous from the cringe-worthy are often the value of the text undergoing translation coupled with readers’ quality expectations. Informal instant-messaging conversations or user-generated content in social media is of relatively low value, so translation errors result in minimal repercussions for even the most horrendous mistranslations. By contrast, legal contracts, financial reports, marketing collateral and application user interfaces usually include text of much higher value that should be translated by human professionals. Text of intermediate value may support a quality level between the two, if the expectations of both the customer and vendor are set appropriately.
When Canadian hockey fans expected quality translation from the French shopping website of their Olympic hockey team, they were sorely disappointed. Machine translation errors irked many visitors, and the team shut down that e-commerce section of the website, foregoing the potential revenue stream.
In contrast, when someone intentionally uses machine translation to simply get the “gist” of a document, and when the alternative to that low-quality translation is no translation at all, they are not nearly so disappointed by the results. When machine translation’s limitations are understood and anticipated, such automatic solutions can be successfully implemented to translate large knowledge bases of user-generated help documentation. Automatic translation can even help facilitate some casual, low-value conversations that would not usually justify an interpreter.
In other cases, legal, financial and political workers are able to comb through enormous volumes of machine translated files — translated behind firewalls using secure systems, not free online tools — to identify key words and select the most pertinent and critical documents, which are then forwarded for higher-quality human translation.
These principles are even understood by Google and other companies that build and market machine translation products. Yes, Google has built an impressive statistical machine translation system, but the search giant involves human professionals to translate higher-value content.
These tips may seem like common sense, but we should not assume everyone “gets it.” As I was so painfully reminded earlier this year, everyone in the content production process must understand the basic capabilities and limitations of machine translation. Unedited, low-cost machine translation can be excellent for translating low-value text and providing the general idea to people who only expect the “gist.” For texts of greater value and for audiences with higher expectations, professional human translation will help companies avoid translation blunders and their costly consequences.
Adam Wooten is director of translation services at Lingotek. He also teaches a course on translation technology at BYU. E-mail: awooten@lingotek.com . Follow him on Twitter at AdamWooten..
參考譯文：
對于即時，非正式翻譯作業(yè)來說，谷歌翻譯和其他免費在線翻譯工具大有用處。如果期望值不高，尤其是對低價值文字，未經編輯的機器翻譯可能非常有用。然而，當用戶過高估機器翻譯的功能，其結果就不止文字混亂那么簡單了。
一個在線機器翻譯工具顯然將一個普通的中國詞“雞樅”誤譯成“維基百科”，英文翻譯的中國菜單鋪天蓋地而來，如“爆炒維基百科”和“叉燒剛果鰻魚與維基百科和腐乳。”雖然不知所云，其錯誤尚無大礙，但是，當涉及到具有重要影響的法律，財務或營銷文本時，其結果可能是極其可怕的昂貴。
潛在客戶在閱讀營銷材料時可能會得到翻譯的要點，但成功的營銷文本通常需要不僅僅是傳達一個總體觀念。戴爾公司全球本地化團隊的高管-韋恩•博爾蘭在德國進行的最近的一項可用性研究中就指出，戴爾注意到... ...“購買者在采購過程中還需建立一種情感連接，他們讓翻譯錯誤搞得既困惑又失望”。
當莫斯科的營銷公司要求我公司審查一些以前翻譯的營銷網絡頁面時，我們不得不告訴該公司他們?yōu)閷嶋H上非常蹩腳的機器翻譯支付了很多冤枉錢。如果這家營銷公司及其客戶寧愿用機器翻譯，這消息本來也可接受。遺憾的是，該公司及其客戶都曾期待得到能體現原有營銷文本精髓的高質量翻譯。需要支付專業(yè)翻譯人員徹底推倒重譯的費用對他們來說不啻是一味難以下咽的苦果。
在2010年的一起法律事故中，“一個參與酒吧斗毆的俄羅斯卡車司機（在荷蘭）被釋放，因為他收到的（法院）傳票是用谷歌翻譯從荷蘭語濫譯成俄文” - 荷蘭語-英語新聞博客24oranges報道。傳票本應讀為，“你必須于2010年8月3日出庭，”但它讀起來更像是“你必須避免于2010年8月3日出庭。”
本專欄先前也曾提到過由于不當使用機器翻譯所造成的許多其他事件。由于免費翻譯網站出現故障，一個中國餐館店面上就掛上了寫有“翻譯服務器錯誤”字樣的標牌。報紙誤譯多次錯誤地引用哈薩克斯坦前總統(tǒng)將“過境天然氣”這一重要問題說成是“放屁（passing gas）”。以色列記者一篇機器翻譯的消息似乎侮辱了一位荷蘭外交官的母親，差點引發(fā)國際事件。最后，一個自動翻譯的家具標簽包含有種族主義的污辱語言，徹底惹惱了加拿大多倫多的客戶。
單純的幽默之所以有別于阿諛奉承，往往體現的就是根據讀者的質量預期所翻譯文本的價值。非正式的即時消息對話或社交媒體用戶生成的內容相對價值較低，因此即使是最可怕的誤譯，翻譯錯誤也不會產生多么大的影響。相比之下，法律合同，財務報表，營銷材料和應用程序用戶界面的文本通常具有較高的價值，應當由人類專業(yè)人員進行翻譯。中間值的文本可能會支持介于兩者間的質量水平，當然還需客戶和供應商提前設定好其期望值。
加拿大冰球球迷期望從其奧林匹克冰球隊的法語購物網站看到高的質量翻譯，然而他們大失所望。機器翻譯中的錯誤激怒了許多游客，團隊不得不關閉其網站中的電子商務部分，其潛在收入來源也付之東流。
相反，當有人故意利用機器翻譯只是想了解一份文件的“要點”，低質量翻譯的替代品簡直就算不上翻譯，然而他們對這樣的結果并不感多么的失望。如果你可以理解并接受機器翻譯的局限性，那就完全可以利用這樣的自動解決方案，對用戶生成的幫助文檔中大量基本知識信息進行翻譯。自動翻譯甚至還可以幫助進行某些隨意而低價值的交談，這種交談通常不需借助口頭翻譯。
在另外一些情況下，法律，金融和政治工作者能夠梳理那些由有防火墻保護的系統(tǒng)，不是免費在線工具所翻譯出來的機器翻譯文件中的大量信息，并找出其關鍵詞，從而選出最切題和最重要的文件，然后再轉給更高質量的人力翻譯處理。
甚至谷歌和其他一些建立和推銷機器翻譯產品的公司也能理解這些原則。是的，谷歌已經建立了一個令人印象深刻的統(tǒng)計式機器翻譯系統(tǒng)，但這個搜索巨頭同樣利用人類專業(yè)人員來翻譯高價值的內容。
這些技巧可能看起來像些常識，但我們不要認為大家都“理解它。”今年早些時候，我突然痛苦地意識到，內容制作過程中的每個人都必須了解機器翻譯的基本能力和局限性。未經編輯，低成本的機器翻譯在翻譯低價值的文字，為那些只想了解“要點”的人們提供總體觀念方面具有出色的可用性。但對于更高價值的文本，對于抱有更高期望值的受眾而言，專業(yè)人力翻譯才能幫助企業(yè)避免嚴重的翻譯失誤和代價高昂的后果。
亞當•伍滕是Lingotek的翻譯服務總監(jiān)。他還在楊百翰大學教授一門翻譯技術課程。電子郵件：awooten@lingotek.com。 在Twitter上（AdamWooten）關注他..
原文鏈接：http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705371107/Google-Translate-has-great-uses-disastrous-misuses.html?pg=3
