Babeling in Translation

Strange as it may seem, there are people who prefer imperfect translation to perfect, just as there are people who think movies have only gone downhill since the silent era. Those of us who feel this way know that it's a great privilege to be living in beta-utopia -- the golden age of bad mechanical translation.

"Then again the face. Merrily. A teacher could be. It would remain however not for a long time, with this easily amused skepticism around eyes and mundwinkel. Strange nose."

That's William Gibson, quoting a mechanical translation of a German description of himself on his blog. "Mundwinkel?" he adds. "I love it when German makes Babelfish give up," he adds. "I love Babelfish hugely, anyway."

It was another science fiction writer, Douglas Adams, who gave the Babel fish its name, long before AltaVista brought us the translation service. Finding somewhat fishy the way aliens and extraterrestrials in sci-fi always seem to speak in perfect (usually British-accented) English, Adams introduced a strange character in his novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- a tiny linguistic deus ex machina in the form of a miraculous fish:

"The Babel fish is small, yellow and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe," Adams wrote. "It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language."

That's the idea, anyway. In practice, the translation services inspired by the Babel fish sometimes give the impression of helping us misunderstand anything said in any one of a dozen languages. Elevators haven't quite been installed in the Tower of Babel yet. And some of us are rather grateful for that. It's a beautiful tower, even if it does look like a cross between a construction site and a ruin.

For those of us who see every error as a potential poem or joke, every new web service or handheld gizmo claiming to do translation strikes a chill in the heart. The other day my girlfriend told me that Sony's PlayStation Portable can now do simultaneous translation using a microphone, speech-recognition and translation software.

It seemed too good -- and too bad -- to be true, so I googled the rumor. Talkman, its makers Lik-Sang claim, offers "a voice-activated translation software application" capable of "pure translations" between English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Japanese. The Gamespot review of Talkman lowers expectations somewhat, though. Not only are all interactions with foreign speakers mediated through a clunky blue bird called Max, "you can ask only the questions that have been pre-recorded into the game."

When Google threw some of its gazillion dollars into its own Google Language Tools service, garble-fans feared that the zany poetry of imperfect web translation would be a thing of the past. So far, it hasn't turned out that way. Especially when it comes to East Asian languages, Google's service renders results as erratic and eccentric as AltaVista's.

Translating the day's Yahoo News headlines from Japanese to English using Google's language tools, for instance, I get -- amongst, admittedly, many perfectly serviceable translations -- beautifully mysterious phrases like "Drinking problem skewered grilled chicken store in kettle restaurant" and "Thrust before the woman Oobu kidnapping murder sun/size". It's the kind of gibberish we can imagine Stephen Malkmus or Of Montreal's Kevin Barnes relishing, and perhaps scribbling down for song titles.

Barnes and Malkmus should take care, though, if they plan to release records based on these phrases. Although it's hard to know how anyone would be able to trace their origin, these mistakes are legally protected. According to the Terms of Use laid out by AltaVista, for instance, "you may not -- and agree not to -- modify, reformat, copy, display, distribute, transmit, publish, license, create derivative works from, transfer or sell any information, products or services obtained from the Services". In the disclaimers section, the company helpfully adds (in capital letters): "YOU UNDERSTAND THAT ALTAVISTA DOES NOT WARRANT THAT THE RESULTS OBTAINED FROM YOUR USE OF THE SERVICES WILL MEET YOUR EXPECTATIONS."

Translated (by Google) into Arabic and back into English that becomes: "You do not understand that it was not that Altavista to the results of the use of such services will not assume expectations." Wow, a triple-negative! No wonder round-trip translation humorists are so often to be found writhing in stitches. You do the math; I'm too busy laughing.