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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.'"
I saw this yesterday and chuckled a little, but it just raised a bunch of questions for me.
The first two are the ones that really puzzle me. Even if it were just a journalist at a high school paper, I would expect them to do better. Go ask for help from the local university or something. Babelfish? Really?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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.
2) Does the country in question have a stick so far up their colective asses they couldn't laugh this off?
This seems the most likely answer. The text is so amazingly bad that it's obvious to anyone that it's at least a complete mistake, if not also obviously a very bad machine generated translation. It's not like the whole thing was reasonable except for one bad insult about the recipient's mother; the whole dang thing is just blatant nonsense.
If your spam filter didn't automatically junk any email addressed to 'Helloh Bud' then you should have the good sense to delete it yourself at that point, nevermind the rest.
"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..."
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.
The one that leaves any untranslated words untranslated. This is probably my biggest beef with babelfish. I think it would be better if it returned the translation with the words it couldn't understand in red or something, or offer a choice of possibilities, based on words that looked the same.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
The technical issue is often due to Journalists having to dumb down technical subjects for the public to understand - or, in some cases, to have technical issues dumed down for them.
As for the "Total fabrication, right?" line, remember that journalists have an obligation to report on only the facts and what's told to them by credible sources. Chances are very good that, despite you thinking you most absolutely know what happened, chances are you haven't a clue. It's the same affect as witnesses to crimes. That's why the press "fabricates" (read: uses the credible sources for) their stories.
I'll probably get modded down for saying this, but lately on Slashdot it seems that bashing the press without justifiation is the best way to get modded up, besides being xenophobic and elitist.
I find the number of people that spend quite a lot of money in English school for 6 years (or more) and speak but a mediocre English staggering. I wonder why that is? Maybe it has to do with English being hard. Yes. Hard. It might be easy for you, but I have dozens of English books around me so that I don't screw up too badly.
I've seen a number of debates over which languages are the most difficult on the planet. The winners in this "contest of shame" are always the ones with the most insane writing systems. First place seems to be a tie between Japanese and Korean, because they both use a jumbled mixture of home-grown phonetic writing plus borrowed Chinese characters. Second place is approximately a tie between the Chinese languages ("dialects";-) and English.
It's common for people not familiar with Chinese writing to claim that it's the world's worst. But in fact it has a significant phonetic component, and when you compare it with the irregularities of English spelling, they turn out to have roughly the same level of phonetic insanity. In most text, English spelling is about as phonetic as Chinese, and about as difficult to learn.
As a result of this, plus the unfortunate fact that English has become the world's "lingua franca" over the past century, some people whose native languages are not English have made a modest proposal: The people in the world who are forced to use English should gang up on the English-speaking part of the world (whom they outnumber), and develop a phonetic writing system for English. They wouldn't try to impose it on the English-speaking people; they would sneak it in through the back door.
They would start by presenting it as a teaching aid. There are already several good candidates for this used in schools in English-speaking countries. They really only need pick one as an international standard. Then they escalate by converting publications in their own countries to this phonetic system. The emphasis would not be converting the English-speaking countries to use it, because this wouldn't happen. Rather, the emphasis would be on converting the non-English parts of the world to using the phonetic system for their own purposes, and the traditional English spelling when dealing with native English speakers.
The idea would be that this approach could make learning English much easier for the rest of the world. And most documents written phonetically could be re-written by computer software with only a bit of human editing. If this system were established, the result could eventually be the slow adoption of the phonetic system by native English speakers.
It's sorta like how the metric system spread throughout the world, and is even making strong inroads in the UK and America. If done right, eventually the English-speaking people would succumb to their natural laziness, and use the easy system. The traditional spelling is a big waste of time to them, too, you know, especially during their school years.
If this seems like a good idea, you should talk it up with friends. Mention it in other online fora like this one. Maybe eventually people outside the English-speaking countries will take it seriously, and do it. It could save everyone a lot of time, and finally give English a decent writing system.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.