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Babelfish Sparks Minor Diplomatic Row
Stony Stevenson writes with a link to a cautionary tale on the ITnews site. A group of journalists heading to The Netherlands were gathering some information prior to the trip. They sent off an email to the Dutch foreign ministry asking some questions, but as they weren't native speakers they needed some help. Unfortunately, they turned to Babelfish for official correspondence. "The beginning of the email read: 'Helloh bud, enclosed five of the questions in honor of the foreign minister: The mother your visit in Israel is a sleep to the favor or to the bed your mind on the conflict are Israeli Palestinian.'"
Which babelfish are we talking about here?
I thought that was a new strain of Dutch hydro at first...
Silly me.
The opposite of progress is congress
How can journalists spark a major diplomatic event?
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
My hovercraft was full of eels.
Are you sure they didn't use some Microsoft based speech engine?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
1) Why does anything involving a bunch of journalists have to do with diplomacy?
2) Does the country in question have a stick so far up their colective asses they couldn't laugh this off?
3) Or is the headline total flamebait, and I'm a sucker?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
but apparently another appendage altogether.
They used the "English to Dutch Jive" setting.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Well, what can ya do? I'm glad to see that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ich_bin_ein_Berliner has been updated for the Modern Age. Incidentally, it turns out the "Ich bin ein Berliner" isn't actually correct. Germans in Berlin refer to themselves as Berliner regularly. Maybe we need a president more like the jelly donuts of yesterday? Somehow, I've digressed from the topic. I think I need more coffee, and a jelly donut. ;)
"Time is nothing; timing is everything."
Nothing like a little searching around... Google for translate and you get a few choices, surely a wise person would check what they were sending?? oops, my bad, these were journalists? Fox news wanna be journalists?
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At least the words, "I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle" didn't drift across the conference table, resonating across time and space.
It's not as though the Dutch bother to learn 1, or 2, or 3+ foreign languages...I mean, surely we'd have been too occupied with our windmills to be able to read a mail in Engrish ;-)
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
Regression of palpable anguish forseen within future modification of linguistic tendency laden spoken word.*
* Translated via Babelfish from Dutch Foreign Minister's reply
Well, at least they didn't use the Vista speech recognition. That could end up as some MAJOR diplomatic misunderstanding...
Most Dutch people speak better English than Dutch (at least according to other Dutch people in neighbouring provinces with a slightly different dialect). I've lived in The Netherlands and I have a Dutch girlfriend since 4 years back, but I can't speak any Dutch - no point in trying since everybody is fluent in English.
All Dutch and Israelis speak English anyway - this is ridiculous.
Goldmember: Can I paint his yoo-hoo gold now? It's kind of my thing, you know...
Dr. Evil: How 'bout no, you crazy Dutch bastard!
--------------------
Goldmember: Dr. Evil, we still have the ultimate insurance policy. May I present to you, the very sexual, the very toite, Austin Power's fahza.
Dr. Evil: His what?
Number 2: His fahza, Dr. Evil.
Dr. Evil: His farger? What's a farger?
Goldmember: His fahza. You know, the fahza.
Dr. Evil: You know Goldmember, I don't speak freaky-deaky Dutch. Okay, perv boy?
Goldmember: Fahza, his dad, dad is fahza.
Dr. Evil: Oh, his dad. His *fa-ther*
"To err is human, to really screw up, you need a computer."
That said I remember a story I heard once from a neighbour. He was in Moscow for a conference, and in the morning he spilled coffee on his tie. So he was wondering i) where to get a necktie in the morning around the hotel and ii) what the hell the russian word for "necktie" is. He remembered: It was similar to the german word for the same thing. So he just tried, walked over to the nearest kiosque and asked the russian lady: "Kravat?" She was killing him with her stare, and he suddenly realized: kravat = bed. galstukh = necktie.
To me, the Netherlands and Israel are two prime examples of countries known for their high level of English literacy. Why wouldn't they just use English but rely on an automated translator?
FTFA:
The beginning of the email read: 'Helloh bud, enclosed five of the questions in honor of the foreign minister: The mother your visit in Israel is a sleep to the favor or to the bed your mind on the conflict are Israeli Palestinian.'
The translation was flawed as Babelfish confused 'ha'im', the Hebrew word for 'if', with 'ha'ima', which means 'mother'.
Oh!!! Of course, that makes sense. Lets fix that right up: s/mother/if
Helloh bud, enclosed five of the questions in honor of the foreign minister: The if your visit in Israel is a sleep to the favor or to the bed your mind on the conflict are Israeli Palestinian.
I don't know about you, but I suspect there might be additional flaws.
I guess the dipshit journalists didn't realize that most Dutch speak English better than Americans or The British.
Sad but true. I've seen too many people who have passed the National Standardized Tests and graduated High School who write about as coherently as what was posted.
Anything you say will be held against you.
So true! Journalists are a powerful group. They are the eyes and ears of the public and have a tremendous influence on public opinion. The lead up to the war in Iraq. No journalists asked questions, no politicians. Journalists wield the power to shape perception, and perception might as well be reality for most people.
I got a catholic block.
My hovercraft is full of eels.
Masonry Stevenson write ITnews with a connection to a warning tale at the place. A group journalists who lead to the Netherlands collected what information before travel. They sent a e-mail to the Dutch foreign ministry putting some questions, but since they were no domestic participants they had one or other aid necessary. Unfortunately, they twisted to Babelfish for official correspondence. The beginning of read e-mail: Included bud Helloh, five of the questions for the ere of the Minister for Foreign Affairs: The mother your visit in Israel is a sleep to the grace or to the bed your opinion on the conflict Israeli palestijn is.
Jive Lady: Oh stewardess! I speak jive.
Randy: Oh, good.
Jive Lady: He said that he's in great pain and he wants to know if you can help him.
Randy: All right. Would you tell him to just relax and I'll be back as soon as I can with some medicine?
Jive Lady: Jus' hang loose, blood. She gonna catch ya up on da' rebound on da' med side.
Second Jive Dude: What it is, big mama? My mama no raise no dummies. I dug her rap!
Jive Lady: Cut me some slack, Jack! Chump don' want no help, chump don't GET da' help!
First Jive Dude: Say 'e can't hang, say seven up!
Jive Lady: Jive ass dude don't got no brains anyhow! Hmmph!
Wah Sig!
Ironically, the "original" Babel Fish was supposed to have caused more and bloodier wars than any other discovery in galactic history because it increased understanding between planets.
Someone please verify this story or else I will take my super karate monkey death car and declare war on the FCC. WAR!
I hope you can appreciate the concern I have for my friend Frankie.
at least no one has vanished in a puff of logic
Babelfish didn't 'spark' anything. Idiot journalists did. What's new about that? As Napoleon had said (not exact, as I don't speak Italian or French), one thousand journalists are more dangerous than four trained soldiers.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
All Your Base Are Belong To Us...
"Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect."
--Mark Twain, on English as She Is Spoke
We have bested the Portuguese masters of muddle! It took the brilliance of a near-passing grade on the Turing test.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
If these guys got upset over what was obviously either a gag or a bad translation then not only are they stupid, but they're incompetent and humourless as well. They also are generating bad press for their country, and it wasn't even people in official capacity that sent the offending letter. The Dutch Foreign Ministry sounds like they could use some serious downsizing.
There was an easy way that they could have avoided this problem: have the translator check its own translation by feeding in the translation and having it translated back into the original language. It would have become immediately obvious that the automatic translator doesn't work and that they should hire a real person to do it. Incidentally, a radio show used to run a music contest where they translated English lyrics to some other language and then back into English. The goal was to figure out what the original song was. And it could be quite hard unless you know the song by heart.
When things like this happen, it would be awesome if you could make light of it. What you really do is bring the journalists in, have a public news conference, and turn it into a small roast.
"I couldn't tell if I was getting an email from Dutch journalists or bankers from Nigeria."
"Mossad was flipping out... they thought this was a death threat from Borat."
"At least they spell better than Bush."
Then you give the journalists a nice gift basket or something, to show it's all in good fun, get some good publicity pictures in shaking hands with them, take them on a tour or something, and then bring them into your office and say "okay lets try that again, this time with a real translator."
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
how did we arrive at the english version that's in tfa. babelfish: dutch -> english? not exactly sure how you can convey dutch grammatical errors in english... smells like trolling. am i missing something here?
I can't find any Hebrew translation option on the babelfish website.
Furthermore, in the Jerusalem Post article, they point to a site babelfish.com, which appears to be a SEO site and doesn't do translations at all.
Compound that with the question of "Why would the Dutch Foreign Ministry care about an email from some random Israeli reporter?", and I'm guessing that this entire story is a hoax.
Yes, I realize that the Jerusalem Post is supposedly a high-quality paper, but the fact that they linked to a site (babelfish.com) that doesn't even do online translations makes me think that this wasn't their most well-researched and well-substantiated work. If this is really causing such a fuss in Holland, how come there is nothing in the Dutch press about this?
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
The funny thing is, even high school dropouts in the Netherlands are likely to speak English, French, and German quite well (though they often hold back on speaking German for, uh, cultural reasons). They are a stone's throw from countries speaking those languages, and unlike many other places, when they import television shows, they keep the original languages and add the subtitles in Dutch.
Plus the Dutch language is not deep in terms of dimensional vocabulary. While the Eskimos may have 70 words for snow, Dutch probably has one. I remember watching a movie and the English line was something like "the pain doesn't hurt" and the Dutch translation was "Pijn is nicht pijn" - Pain is not pain.
Of course it's very respectful to try to speak someone's language, especially when most of your countrymen (and the rest of the world, generally) don't bother. A diplomatic row? I doubt it.
translated into dutch through babelfish->
response from dutch foreign minister->
translated into english through babelfish->
there, see? if everyone had just followed through, there would have been no problem
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
CENTURION: What's this, then? 'Romanes Eunt Domus'? 'People called Romanes they go the house'?
BRIAN: It-- it says, 'Romans, go home'.
CENTURION: No, it doesn't. What's Latin for 'Roman'? Come on!
BRIAN: Aah!
CENTURION: Come on!
BRIAN: 'R-- Romanus'?
CENTURION: Goes like...?
BRIAN: 'Annus'?
CENTURION: Vocative plural of 'annus' is...?
BRIAN: Eh. 'Anni'?
CENTURION: 'Romani'. 'Eunt'? What is 'eunt'?
BRIAN: 'Go'. Let--
CENTURION: Conjugate the verb 'to go'.
BRIAN: Uh. 'Ire'. Uh, 'eo'. 'Is'. 'It'. 'Imus'. 'Itis'. 'Eunt'.
CENTURION: So 'eunt' is...?
BRIAN: Ah, huh, third person plural, uh, present indicative. Uh, 'they go'.
CENTURION: But 'Romans, go home' is an order, so you must use the...?
BRIAN: The... imperative!
CENTURION: Which is...?
BRIAN: Umm! Oh. Oh. Um, 'i'. 'I'!
CENTURION: How many Romans?
BRIAN: Ah! 'I'-- Plural. Plural. 'Ite'. 'Ite'.
CENTURION: 'Ite'.
BRIAN: Ah. Eh.
CENTURION: 'Domus'?
BRIAN: Eh.
CENTURION: Nominative?
BRIAN: Oh.
CENTURION: 'Go home'? This is motion towards. Isn't it, boy?
BRIAN: Ah. Ah, dative, sir! Ahh! No, not dative! Not the dative, sir! No! Ah! Oh, the... accusative! Accusative! Ah! 'Domum', sir! 'Ad domum'! Ah! Oooh! Ah!
CENTURION: Except that 'domus' takes the...?
BRIAN: The locative, sir!
CENTURION: Which is...?!
BRIAN: 'Domum'.
CENTURION: 'Domum'.
BRIAN: Aaah! Ah.
CENTURION: 'Um'. Understand?
BRIAN: Yes, sir.
CENTURION: Now, write it out a hundred times.
BRIAN: Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Hail Caesar, sir.
CENTURION: Hail Caesar. If it's not done by sunrise, I'll cut your balls off.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
"To really screw up, you need humans trying to communicate but in an incompetent manner."
Nearly every computer screw up is just a special case of this general principle, only mediated through the miscommunication of a computer system's requirements and capabilities.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It couldn't have possibly been Babelfish, since Babelfish doesn't support Hebrew.
It may have been babylon.com, but this hasn't been confirmed.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
FTFA: "How could this email possibly have been sent?" an Israeli diplomat told the Jerusalem Post. "These journalists have sparked a major incident."
Get real. If you are so shallow and thin skinned as to take offense at what is obviously a mistake in translation then you really need to re-think your career choice. "Diplomat"? How about "ass-hat". As for the journalists who were too lazy to get a proper translation (or at least to include the English text of the email), you need to Grok the phrases, "attention to detail" and "due diligence". I recommend my new book that will be hitting the store shelves soon: "How not to look like a total ass-clown in written correspondence".
Veritas patesco per quaestio questio. Truth is revealed through questions.
I didn't think to try Dutch to Hebrew, though!
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Annyong!
All your basis is belongs to our...
The Helloh button honours the memory of 5 questions dlinniy the Minister the strangers of affairses: The nut/mother will be your attendance enevolencesschlaf in Israel, or at the bed your conflict brain will be Palestinian israeliano
I'd definitely say there are bigger problems here.
Has anyone else noticed that the Babelfish site doesn't actually list Hebrew as a choice? This makes the whole thing a little fishy-sounding (pun intended) to me.
"ha'ima" actually means "the mother". So, while bablefish may produce errors, apparently so do reporters... Also, IIRC, in non-transliterated Hebrew, the two words are homonyms.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
they quickly blamed the Bush Administration for the errors.
Navy Tim www.navytim.com
cause diplomatic row... because I don't recall Babelfish (or any other free online translation s/w) claiming to be 100% accurate or anything like that. Dutch is not so rare you cannot find someone who can translate (perhaps for a fee).
I'm beginning to suspect that the whole story is a hoax.
First off, babelfish doesn't translate Hebrew, and with good reason. Hebrew is hard for a computer to translate. The three letters, Heh Aleph Mem could have just as easily been translated to "the nation" or "the nut" (as in nuts and bolts) as it was to "the mother". The only way to know the correct translation is to know the context of the word, which is not always easy.
Secondly, whomever wrote this hoax doesn't speak Hebrew very well. You don't have to go from "ha'im" to "ha'ima" to get from "if" to "the mother". In fact, the letters Heh Aleph Mem could be read as "ha'im" (if) or "ha'aim" (the mother) without having to add a letter to get all the way to "ha'ima".
Lastly, the Dutch are world-renowned for their extreme tolerance. There is no way a Dutch person would be deeply offended over something like this.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
What's that supposed to be? A man with a propeller on his belly-button?
They translated it from Hebrew to English (not Dutch) -- hence the availability of quotes in English.
The Reg also initially made the mistake of trusting their source unquestioningly and didn't think to check whether Babelfish actually had a Hebrew option (I'm surprised how few of you checked!), but to their credit, they've updated. Check it out... there's a new culprit in the frame, but I won't name names for fear of libel suits if it's not true.
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
They never quote the original text! I will grant you the translation is a little...choppy. But let's not blame Babelfish until we know it really did foul up. Maybe the reporters well spoken not were.
Before the journalists were led away by police, one of them could be heard yelling, "My nipples explode with delight!"
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
Speaking as an American->Netherlands expat: Despite the fact that many of the younger generation of Dutch speak english fluently, many of the older generation do not. In addition, add in a government employee's reluctance to extend his neck at all by saying something incorrect in another language, and you can really have some communication problems. Not to mention, the Dutch nation is having a xenophobic crisis right now which makes it uncomfortable for those of us who just want to live here quietly and do our jobs.
Just think of the magnitude of the incident that could have been sparked if Babelfish had translated the journalists' questions correctly.
This story made me think of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country where the crew are trying to get past Rura Penthe sentries using old books and translating badly. The Klingons decide the abysmal Klingon speech is a joke and let them pass.
Damn. I'm pathetic =(
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
"Helloh bud, enclosed five of the questions in honor of the foreign minister: The mother your visit in Israel is a sleep to the favor or to the bed your mind on the conflict are Israeli Palestinian"
"The mother" - in Hebrew "Ha'em". "if" - "Ha'im". However, "if" was used to start a question, which is great in Hebrew, not in English. Same as "Did your... ?"
"sleep" - in Hebrew "shina". Written the same as "changed"
"bed" - in Hebrew "mita", which is written almost the same as the world "tilt" which is used in the expression "changed your mind".
"Did your visit in Israel changed your favor or your mind about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict"
For your edification.
6. MEMBER CONDUCT
(...)
You agree to not use the Service to:
(...)
o. translate any correspondence, of any kind, which could lead to diplomatic rows, a chilling of diplomatic relations, armed hostilities, and/or Global Thermal Nuclear War.
For the perfect anti-Unix, write an OS that thinks it knows what you're doing better than you do and let it be wrong.
Er is geen diplomatiek incident. De Minister van Buitenlandse zaken Verhagen heeft geen klacht ingediend want hij weet niet bij wie hij een klacht zou moeten indienen, als hij daar al behoefte aan had. De vertaling was gemaakt van Hebreeuws naar Engels en niet naar Nederlands. Niet met Babelfish want dat kent geen Hebreeuws. De journalisten zijn nog steeds welkom maar de minister denkt dat het handiger voor ze is om hun vertaalcomputer mee te nemen.
Translate this with your computer for ultimate truth.
Where I accepted the translation from "All your base are belong to US" instead of "All your base are belong to us".
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
"all green of skin... 800 centuries ago.. their bodily fluids include the birth of half-breeds... for the fundamental truth is self-determination of the cosmos... for dark is the suede... that mows like a harvest..."
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
I like translating a sentence back and forth between languages.
english->spanish->english
I have taste to backwards translate an oration forwards and between the languages.
english->german->english
I may translate a sentence between languages back and forth.
english->russian->english
I love to transfer proposal back and forth between the languages.
english->greek->english
I wish a proposal back and forth between the languages.
-- QED
After reading the /. blurb and the article, and deciding I don't care if it's a hoax or not, I have but one thing to say;
AH-HAHAHAHAHA! That's freakin' funny!
Whacha.
Lighten up world. Please.
Oh, for the days when sig's didn't have to be cute...hey, wait a sec.
very funny to read the translation in French as well, why would anyone use a translator, i know some companies use them, that's why we get those funny description on stickers but hell how stupid can someone be?
'ai vu ceci hier et ai ri sous cape, mais il a juste soulevé un groupe de questions pour moi. 1. Comment bon un journaliste pouvez-vous être si vous faites confiance à Babelfish pour traduire la substance pour vous ? 2. Comment pourriez-vous compter sur les réponses que vous avez obtenues puisque vous devriez les courir par Babelfish également ? 3. Les interviewés ne pourraient-ils pas dire que c'était une traduction automatique terrible ? me dites-vous qu'il était tout parfait vers le haut jusqu'à cette phrase ? Les deux premiers sont ceux qui m'embarassent vraiment. Même si il étaient juste un journaliste à un papier de lycée, je m'attendrais à ce qu'ils fassent mieux. Allez demandent l'aide de l'université locale ou de quelque chose. Babelfish ? Reall
This whole news item, which I first saw reported elsewhere, just seems too much to be true. Nothing really adds up. I think that this is some sort of hoax, joke, or that something like this happened, but it is being blown way out of proportion to what actually happened.
The quote, at least as I've heard it, goes as follows:
"To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer."
~Farmers' Almanac, 1978
While Twain may have said that, he must not've been convinced because he later on wrote his own version: The Jumping Frog: In English. Then in French. Then Clawed Back into a Civilized Language Once More by Patient, Unremunerated Toil. It's a brilliantly funny book, especially inasmuch as Clemens, himself, did the translation back into English, carefully choosing his idioms for maximum effect.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
is Maxime Verhagen and he certainly appears to have a) better things to do and b) a lot more important things to already contend with than to worry about some alleged nonsense from lalaland. If you check through the 'news' sites and blogs from the Jerusalem Post - the origin of the story you find not one single source of attribution not one, if you switch to the Dutch sites, the only thing they add is the ministers name - well they would know that if they were journalists wouldn't they? The alleged English of the message is such complete drivel it could have been a Modern Talking hit from the 80's.
Until evidence presents itself to the contrary you can file this story under 'Not True'
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
here is the L337 Speak version, courtesy of http://www.brenz.net/l337Maker.asp.
/\/\1|\|1573R: 7|-|3 /\/\07|-|3R j00R \/1517 1|\| 15R43L 15 4 5L33P 70 7|-|3 Ph4\/0R 0R 70 7|-|3 b3D j00R /\/\1|\|D 0|\| 7|-|3 (0|\|PhL1(7 r 15R43L1 p4L3571|\|14|\|
|-|3LL0|-| bUD, 3|\|(L053D Ph1\/3 0Ph 7|-|3 QU35710|\|5 1|\| |-|0|\|0R 0Ph 7|-|3 Ph0R319|\|
Freemasonry Stevenson writes with dangerously gives place ITnews for the warning fable. The group or leads in Holland's journalists, which information has collected own is reniflement. He delivered asked they simplified some questions to Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs's email, but she was not is manufactured in the ashore that absolutely domestic participant any necessity to have. They unfortunately have been curving are Babelfish are the official correspondence.
"It's amazing what velocity can do when human beings are in season" -Matthew Good
If you can quote and entire dialog of "Life of Brian" from memory....you might be a geek
If you still laugh at, "Somebody set us up the bomb"......you might be a geek
If you've ever argued whether Sisko of Janeway was the better captian.....you might be a geek
If you've ever welcomed ANY kind of "Overlords"........you might be a geek
If George Lucas "ruined your childhood"........you might be a geek
If you think I'm being an "Insensitive Clod"........you might be a geek
{.....sad thing is.....I could do a lot more of these}
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Yeat another example of "the language problem."
I recommend this video by a former UN and World Health Organization translator, Mr. Claude Piron:
http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=_YHALnLV9XU
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Oh my God!
I used to think Babelfish was, like, state-of-the-art...
Now I realize we're not better off than stupid dictionary look-ups people do all the time - and for which the 1855 book is famous for.
What a fucking shame the state of machine-translation.
Now's the time for the Esperanto plug - a better tool.
I guess brains still beat computers when it comes to languages.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Original story in http://www.ice.co.il/article.asp?pgId=112580&catId=2 (hebrew)
It hit ynet in http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3469301,00.html (hebrew)
- They used "Babylon" and not "Babelfish".
- A "Knesset" (parliament) member was invited to Holland by the Netherland's foreign minister together with some journalists. They were asked to submit their questions in advance. The questions were never really "asked", as the meeting will take place at November 23-28.
- "bed" was a typo of the reporting website. The Hebrew story had "bad".
- For Hebrew speakers: The question was " - -?"
I love Babelfish, I think it's a great system for giving a rough idea of what the words in another language (in my case, of course, anything other than English) mean, or giving you a somewhat passable translation of your language into another. But anyone who's looked at the output of Babelfish should know, or should have reason to know, that it is not perfect and is basically good for getting the 'gist' of the item, the ideas. Which is about all you can do with automated translation. We do have an advantage, I think it's been said that, in English, anyway, that you can lose about 1/3 of the words in a sentence and still get the idea across. So there is some redundancy and that does help, but, it is an automated system and lacks judgment. And apparently, so did the people who used it and didn't warn the recipient.
Maybe it's me, but when I've posted a message where someone wrote something in a foreign (to me) language, and I replied to them, I included a note - in that language - indicating I am using a computer translation and it may have errors. And I do a cross-check by translating it back that the note that it may have errors won't. :)
So let me get this straight, some people used an automated translation system, without bothering to tell the person whom they were sending a somewhat important message, that the message had to be translated using software? I guess they never thought that translation software commonly has errors. It will do a reasonable job but it guesses, and sometimes it guesses wrong. I suppose they have never looked at a web page written in some other language and seen it translated to English. Anyone having used any computer system should know there is a possibility of error - in fact, strong probability if not guaranteed certainty - in automated processing of tasks which require human judgment. To be a little erudite here, I will throw in the gratuitous foreign language comment that judgment, is, primus inter pares, the hardest part of any task, because it cannot be automated, (or maybe I'll weasel out a bit by claiming it is extremely hard to automate). (For those that don't know latin, the phrase means 'first among equals', e.g. I mean all the tasks are hard, but some are harder, and on the difficulty scale, judgment is top of the list.)
Language translation is an art, because there can often be more than one way to phrase the sentence, and in some cases, there may not be an exact equivalence between the two languages for the term used. Even in English there are still problems; the term 'free software' has a problem because the word 'free' can be used in two completely different meanings depending on whether one means free of restrictions (what is sometimes called 'software libre') and 'free of cost'. But sometimes the term has no ambiguity even if one of the words does. When we speak of free speech, we mean the right to say what one pleases (within very narrow restrictions) without fear of government reprisal; it does not necessarily mean that you get to hear the person's opinions without someone paying for them, as in the case of TV and newspaper columnists. Knowing when an ambiguity is present and when it isn't is a judgement call. And that's something computers have a very hard time doing.
The other poster (caffeinemessiah) was right, the headline should have read Morons trusting the legendary untrustworthiness of Babelfish for official work spark minor diplomatic row.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
Monty Python already illustrated the dangers of blindly using translation devices...
... um ... cigarettes." (holds up a pack)
... my hovercraft is full of eels."
..." (pantomimes puffing a cigarette) "... is full of eels." (pretends to strike a match)
... do you waaaaaant ... to come back to my place, bouncy-bouncy?"
... I am no longer infected."
..." (takes phrase book, flips through it) "... Costs six and six ... ah, here we are." (speaks weird Hungarian-sounding words)
A Hungarian tourist (John Cleese) approaches the clerk (Terry Jones). The tourist is reading haltingly from a phrase book.
Hungarian: "I will not buy this record, it is scratched."
Clerk: "Sorry?"
Hungarian: "I will not buy this record, it is scratched."
Clerk: "Uh, no, no, no. This is a tobacconist's."
Hungarian: "Ah! I will not buy this *tobacconist's*, it is scratched."
Clerk: "No, no, no, no. Tobacco
Hungarian: "Ya! See-gar-ets! Ya! Uh
Clerk: "Sorry?"
Hungarian: "My hovercraft
Clerk: "Ahh, matches!"
Hungarian: "Ya! Ya! Ya! Ya! Do you waaaaant
Clerk: "Here, I don't think you're using that thing right."
Hungarian: "You great poof."
Clerk: "That'll be six and six, please."
Hungarian: "If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me? I
Clerk: "Uh, may I, uh
Hungarian punches the clerk. Meanwhile, a policeman (Graham Chapman) on a quiet street cups his ear as if hearing a cry of distress. He sprints for many blocks and finally enters the tobacconist's.
Cop: "What's going on here then?"
Hungarian: "Ah. You have beautiful thighs."
Cop: (looks down at himself) "WHAT?!?"
Clerk: "He hit me!"
Hungarian: "Drop your panties, Sir William; I cannot wait 'til lunchtime." (points at clerk)
Cop: "RIGHT!!!" (drags Hungarian away by the arm)
Hungarian: (indignantly) "My nipples explode with delight!"
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
English: I do not see
French: Je ne vois pas
Twain's translation: I no see not
The French there isn't really "no see not", that's just how you say "do not see" in French. But if you translate one word at a time, that's what you get. He did that with the whole essay.
It's old enough that it isn't under copyright anymore. Here's a link. (There are typos on this page):
http://members.cox.net/deleyd/religion/solarmyth/frog.html
Twain's final comment is great:
I found that web page from the Wikipedia article on the Jumping Frog story. I love Wikipedia.
Slashdot's MOD pool has been very sensitive to any attack on Microsoft today. I smell something funny.
BabelFish is just stupid. Better to use SysTranNet. I sell guitar effect pedals on eBay and use SysTranNet to translate any questions received from a non-English speaking country (including Quebec) into the native language of the originator. Results appear to be excellent.
I rate machine language translation on a scale of one to five. One is word-to-word translation. Two is phrase translation with correct spelling and grammar in both languages. Three is paragraphs for magazines and college student reports. Four is film, newspaper, and conversational level quality. Five is literature and diplomatic level. BabelFish is between one and two: Systran is about level four (as far as I can tell, as I'm not a linguist, much less a cunning one).
Anyway, After extensive tours of the coffeeshops of the Netherlands, I've been told repeatedly to leave Dutch language to the Dutch people. Everyone not Dutch doing anything in the Netherlands is politely requested to use English. People in the Netherlands claim to have the ability to understand your bad English much better than they can understand your bad Dutch. Something about the very complex structure of the vowel sounds, I've been told. Then again, maybe it was the coffee.
So, yes, avoid Babelfish except as a joke. Demand quality machine language translation. It is likely to be the next 'killer application' of 64-bit processors.
It's a cookbook!
Did anybody get eaten by a small dog?
Evidence suggests Mark Twain rarely said things he actually believed to be true. ;)
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Something I was unaware of, I thought it was a botched translation of something in English. But someone on the original site made an important point in a comment. The reporters were writing in Hebrew, and the output was supposed to be in Dutch. Only Babelfish doesn't do Hebrew, if it's the one accessible through Altavista. It does English and French to Dutch, and it also does Japanese, Russian and Chinese to English. But it doesn't do Hebrew either way. So I'm curious how this article originally got mangled. Either it wasn't the Babelfish I'm thinking of, it was a different site and wasn't Babelfish at all but some other web site, or it was a commercial program that botched this.
Also, as was also pointed out, someone at some newspaper writes an embassy about something and causes a diplomatic incident, gee, sounds like someone's awfully touchy. Reminds me of how those Mohammed cartoons caused a large part of the Muslim community to want to go Jihad over some newspaper from Sweden or one of the countries around there.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
The application in question is not AltaVista's Babelfish, but rather Babylon, which was originally created by Israelies, hence it has Hebrew-English translation capabilities.
The reporter in question did not know English well, so he used Babylon to translate his questions and didn't bother to proof. Due to many reasons, including the imperfect nature of translation engines and the fact that much of Hebrew is read by context (vowels are implicit half of the time), the translation turned out very badly.
For instance, if you take the sentence "Ha'im neheneta" which means "Did you enjoy", the fact that vowels are implicit means the sentence can be read "Ha'em nehenta", which means "The mother enjoyed."
"Programming is life, the rest is mere details"
The Israelis wanted to translate Hebrew to Dutch, right? So how come the excerpt from the tranlsation is in English?
Also, surely every foreign ministry in the world receives a generous daily helping of incoherent email from spammers and the mentally ill. How did they know to choose this particular one to have an incident over?
-Graham
I really was amazed. Mod parent up.
Crap. What did the new CSS do with the "Post anonymously" option??
After lying down in font the bulldozer, Ford will convince Mr. Prosser to lie down in your place, you can go with him to the pub to drink your beer. After you have drank the beer and fed the dog the Vogons will show up. Get the signaling device Ford drops and make sure you press the GREEN button. You are now in dark.
Once you come to your senses, you will be in a Vogon hold with smelly alien underwear. There is a Babelfish dispensing machine here. You can get one (for free even). Just:
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
All your press release are belong to us!
Have gnu, will travel.
One correction, though, which is fairly relevant. It wasn't Babelfish that was used for the translation, it was Babylon. Babelfish doesn't even support Hebrew.
I think Babelfish is, in fact, smart enough to understand that the same word in different contexts can mean different things. One of the main problems with machine translating (and NLP) Hebrew is that the language is very compact as far as spelling goes. The "the" word is just a letter added to the beginning of the word, which compact similarly spelled words together. In this case, the word , which in this case was supposed to mean "Whether", was misidentified as "", meaning "The", and "", meaning "mother". The only way it could happen was if a word by word translation was done, which is known to be a horrible thing.
In other words, yes, it was a moronic act of blind reliance.
Shachar
OK! For those who have NOT read Douglas Adams,
"I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle"
Started a interstellar war.
http://www.cgoakley.demon.co.uk/vlhurgs/index.html
"It is of course well known that careless talk costs lives, but the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated.
For instance, at the very moment that Arthur said, 'I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle,' a freak wormhole opened up in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried his words far far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space to a distant galaxy where strange and warlike beings were poised on the brink of a frightful interstellar battle.
The two opposing leaders were meeting for the last time.
A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl'hurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the G'Gugvuntt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green sweet-smelling steam, and, with a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, challenged the vile creature to take back what it had said about his mother.
The creature stirred in his sickly broiling vapour, and at that very moment the words, 'I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle' drifted across the conference table.
Unfortunately, in the Vl'hurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war for centuries."
Oh MOD PARENT +1 FUNNY... ah hahhahahahah!
From Babelfish
"É naturalmente bom sabido que a conversa descuidada custa vidas, mas a escala cheia do problema não é apreciada sempre. Por exemplo, no momento very que Arthur disse, ' eu pareço ter a dificuldade tremenda com meu lifestyle, ' um wormhole freak aberto acima na tela do continuum do espaço-tempo e carreguei suas palavras distante distante para trás a tempo através dos alcances quase infinitos do espaço a uma galáxia distante onde os seres estranhos e warlike poised no brink de uma batalha interstellar frightful. Os dois líderes opondo-se estavam encontrando-se com por a última vez. Um silêncio terrível caiu através da tabela de conferência como o comandante do Vl'hurgs, resplendent em seus shorts jewelled pretos da batalha, olhado levelly no líder de G'Gugvuntt que squatting oposto a ele em uma nuvem do vapor sweet-smelling verde, e, com o milhão lustroso e beweaponed horribly os cruzadores da estrela poised para desencadear a morte elétrica em sua única palavra do comando, desafiado a criatura vile fazer exame para trás o que tinha dito sobre sua mãe. A criatura agitou em seu vapor broiling sickly, e nesse muito momento as palavras, ' eu pareço ter a dificuldade tremenda com meu lifestyle ' drifted através da tabela de conferência. Infelizmente, na lingüeta de Vl'hurg este era o insulto o mais terrível imaginable, e não havia nada para ele mas para empreender a guerra terrível por séculos."
I showed this to a friend of mine who speaks Protuguese. After reading only a few sentences, he laughed out loud for a long time. It wasnt so much as the joke itself, but the translantion. Its so extrodinarly bad.
Look at the re-translation:
"Of course good it is known that the careless colloquy cost lives, but the full scale of the problem is not appreciated always.
For example, at the moment very that Arthur said, ' I seem to have the tremendous difficulty with mine lifestyle, ' one wormhole freak (HA!) opened above in the screen of continuum of the space-time and carreguei its words distant distant stops backwards the time (HA!) through reaches them almost infinite of the space to a distant galaxy where the strange beings and warlike poised in brink of a battl
"Judicious lying is what the world needs. I sometimes think it were even better and safer not to lie at all than to lie injudiciously. An awkward, unscientific lie is often as ineffectual as the truth."
-- Mark Twain, "On the Decay of the Art of Lying"
I can't figure it out either. It's a mystery, like the Nazca lines. Maybe it was left by ancients, guided in it's design by extra terrestrials.
Wonderful reply. Thanks, I had not realized how rich and broad the tradition was.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Done this, officially, in both Russian and Mandarin (but not with BabelFish). The knack is to re-input the foreign translation after you've got it, and see what it then says in English. Then change your English text (usually by being much more 'literal') and see if the tough spots get better. When it comes back from the reinput intelligibly the same as you meant - send it along. Gives you an insight into the quirks of English, too. Of course, if you have the time and money, support a starving translator. (But for online orders, check the different versions of Chinese as above). And if it's just Dutch, guys, merely half-close your eyes and read the stuff back.
http://www.depers.nl/binnenland/120757/E-mail-Israël-schokt-Verhagen.html
Translated by hand;
Klacht
Complaint
Volgens de Jerusalem Post zou minister Verhagen zo boos zijn dat hij overweegt de hele excursie af te blazen en een formele klacht in te dienen bij de Israëli's.
Een woordvoerder van het ministerie spreekt dat tegen. "We zijn helemaal niet boos of beledigd, zulke dingen kunnen gebeuren", aldus de zegsman tegen DePers.nl. "De Jerusalem Post meldt ook dat we een 'formal complaint' willen indienen, maar ik zou niet eens weten bij wie."
A spokesperson of the ministry denies this. We're not mad or insulted at all, these things happen according to the spokesman to depers.nl. The Jerursalem Post also says we want to post a formal complaint, but I wouldn't even know with who.
Bezoek afgeblazen
Visit cancelled
De woordvoerder bevestigt wel dat het bezoek van de journalisten niet doorgaat. "Maar dat is om een heel andere reden, namelijk omdat de journalisten onvoldoende Engels spreken. Het doel van de reis is om een breed beeld van Nederland te schetsen, waarbij de Tweede Kamer en universiteiten worden bezocht. We hebben in het verleden gemerkt dat als je met tolken werkt, dat het de spontaniteit en interactiviteit eruit haalt."
The spokesperson confirms the visit is cancelled. "But for a very different reason, that the journalists don't speak enough English. The purpose of the trip is to show a broad image of the Netherlands, where we visit the parliament and universities. We found in the past that when one works via interpreters, this removes spontaneity and interactivity.
End of story.
-- Re the comment from Satanicpuppy: "The real hilarity of it is, in the Netherlands, of all places, you can find tons of english speakers. Hell, the people who got the letter probably spoke decent english. Why, in gods name, would you do such an amatuer translation, and not just assume that someone will be able to read it."
-- Decent English you say?
Telephone tag: You've understood it wrong. The original thoughts were written in Hebrew, then Altavisa Babelfish was used to translate the Hebrew into Dutch. We see it in English because someone further translated the errant Dutch into English so we could have a quasi-relevant view of how bad it sounded.
What we are shown in the original post is a (Babelfish?) translation of a Dutch sentence into English - which sentence was generated by a Babelfish translation of a Hebrew sentence into Dutch. What we are seeing is a lot like a game of telephone but with nodes not quite so smart as human, operating by algorithm and hence unable to check and correct themselves.
Limitations of Babelfish: Personally I've used Babelfish to translate Dutch to English and have been well amused. On the other hand I know enough Dutch to look at the Dutch and correct the translation, make it "good enough" that I can understand it. I have used the Babelfish engine to generate Dutch from English and I shudder because I understand how terrible the ensuing Dutch must be. I keep my sentences simple.
Limitations of those Israelis: Thus I can infer that the responsibility level and experience of the Israeli (diplomats?) is low. Their common sense is also low. I know better than to use a metaphor or a colorful phrase in a translation Black-Box. I know it will come through twisted. The low responsibility comes in, in that they didn't run it through a Dutch native speaker. Or just write it in English, the common international language.
CF the Bushies and beyond: My, it's good to see something other than the studied professionalism, acting and falseface of our US crew.
Looking up source: I looked at the Jerusalem Post website to see if I could tell what was being said from the original article since that would tell me a lot more and clear up whether the original was put in in Hebrew script or transliteration. Herbrew is not the easiest language to deal with because of the alphabet and the absence of vowels in normal writing. Alas that article costs money. I would be pleased to read it if someone would post it to me or the group. Thank you.
Better than Babelfish: And one final comment, should anyone else be trying a similar trick. There is a company called Babylon that will give you a 30 day trial of their superior translation product. At least this was true last time I checked.
(A plug for myself!: A free copy for this plug would be accepted with pleasure.)
I have worked with Engineers for Philips and with spam desk people from the Netherlands, ALL of whom expressed displeasure when working with people who will not speak English. They all spoke Dutch and very good English -- and they expect other people to speak English. Documentation for the equipment I was working on was written in English and the engineers said that the documents would not be translated into Dutch. The engineers even spoke English among themselves. I believe that most, if not all, educated Dutch can read English.
It is a cool story, this is a time when you should have logged in.. :-)
The Jerusalem Post got its facts wrong, and the media followed suit. Babel Fish doesn't offer Hebrew-English translation. It was actually Babylon that was used to translate the questions.
- Ido Kenan
Room 404 (http://www.room404.net/eng)