The New York Times had an interesting story a few days back on the improvements Google has made on its translation tools. The triggering event was a message by a Korean fan who wrote that Google was his favorite search engine, which the translate engine transformed into: “The sliced raw fish shoes it wishes. Google green onion thing!” Since then, the improvements have been vast and so are the potential implications:
“This technology can make the language barrier go away,” said Franz Och, a principal scientist at Google who leads the company’s machine translation team. “It would allow anyone to communicate with anyone else.”
This made me wonder whether the translate engine has already become a useful research tool for scholars of comparative and international politics. I don’t think an automatic translation tool can ever fully replace knowledge of languages but perhaps it is able to provide a quick sense of what’s going on in a foreign place. As the article puts it:
Google’s service is good enough to convey the essence of a news article, and it has become a quick source for translations for millions of people. “If you need a rough-and-ready translation, it’s the place to go,” said Philip Resnik, a machine translation expert and associate professor of linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park.
My first experiment was not very encouraging. I was curious about the response to Real Madrid’s elimination from the Champions League last night after spending record amounts on high profile players. According to Google Translate, the Madrid coach Pellegrini said he will quit his job (see also here), whereas the Spanish version says the opposite “No voy a renunciar a mi puesto.”
I would love to hear some experiences of researchers with more political texts. My first thought is that it might be a useful way to take a first cut at documents in languages one reads slowly but that it is not (yet) a tool that is ready to be applied to languages one doesn’t understand at all.
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Your assessment is correct for the most part. It’s not a useful research tool when used to translate whole documents. However, it’s very useful for translating individual words without running to the dictionary. It’s also very useful for scanning/skimming documents; I work in a language that uses a different script and my skimming/scanning speed is not nearly what it is in English. So, it’s sometimes helpful to run a document through Google Translate just to find out if it’s relevant or not without sitting down to translate it.
http://artgoldhammer.blogspot.com/2010/03/machine-translation.html
Eric,
I tried to use it during the summer of 2009 in order to translate descriptions of foreign aid projects. It did not work. We had to hire translation service instead. But, I’ll try it again to see if the improvements are sufficient.
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