Technology

Motorized Crib

If you have worked on a product that goes worldwide you probably know how painful it is to get the product localized (translated into local language of a country). You have to find a translator and pray that the translation is accurate or at least close to it. Any ‘cultural’ mistake and your profits from that part of the world are history. Finding a translator is another issue. Usually, companies contact their partners in the country they wish to launch the product in and get it translated in the local language. I myself do this for the company I work for and completely understand the pain and frustration this process puts one through. Especially, when I see ?$!@:#% and have no clue if it means “thank you” or “spank you”. As our understanding of human languages gets better, a new generation of software has emerged that automatically translates text from one language to another. Online version of this software allows us to automatically translate websites and emails.

The story about my knowledge of this online translation software is an interesting one. I once received an email from a visitor of my site faridi.net. This email was in French. At first, I just stared at it blankly. Later, after realizing that no matter how long I stare at it I still won’t understand French, I decided to get some help. None of my contacts was a Frenchman (or a Frenchwoman but let’s not get there). I eventually ended up doing a google (a new term coined for searching on google.com) and found Lycos’ Babel Fish software. The story about this ‘Babel Fish’ is an interesting one but I think it’s best to leave it for some other time. To cut the story short, I parsed the email through Babel Fish online software, read the translated text in English, wrote up a reply in English, parsed it through the reverse translator, and… it’s all history now.

During this interesting exercise, I learnt that although a very helpful tool, automatic translation software is still in its infancy and needs a lot more understanding of human languages. It’s crude and must only be used for informal translations. The translated text I received was in English all right, but it was very hard to comprehend. In fact it was almost funny. It was as if someone took an English text and replaced all the words with their synonyms. A recent experience by a friend of mine convinced me that when it comes to professional translations, human translator is the way to go, at least for now.

Following is a scanned image of Ericsson battery packing. Please judge for yourself if our oriental neighbors were justified in using translation software:

Note to readers: The title of this article, ‘Motorized Crib’, is merely a synonym replacement of ‘Automatic Translation‘.