Machine translation is free; but is it up to snuff, or do you get what you pay for?

SAECULII Y.K. (Tokyo, Japan) every four years runs an experiment to determine if machines translation (MT) is capable of producing quality, professional Japanese translation. Read more about that here

It’s the year 2011 and the free online translator -AKA machine translation- we’re testing in our experiment is Babel Fish Online Translator

Machine Translation Experiment Methodology

We took the following passage from the business article As Kindle Fire Faces Critics, Remedies Are Promised (Yahoo!, 2011-12-14) (Yahoo!, 2011-12-14):

The Kindle Fire, Amazon’s heavily promoted tablet, is less than a blazing success with many of its early users.

We ran this passage through machine translation for:

1. English-to-Japanese Translation (i.e., translate to get Japanese text), then
2. Japanese-to-English Translation (i.e., reverse translate back to English text).

Why do we reverse the translation?

The thinking is that if machine translation is any good -efficacy- the reverse translation should be the same, or very similar, to the original English passage. This approach will help folks that do not speak Japanese determine for themselves just how good machine translation really is.

Does Machine Translation Produce Professional Japanese Translation?

Let’s take a look.

Step 1: English-to-Japanese Translation
First, we translate the English passage to get Japanese text.

Looks pretty darn good, doesn’t it? And, it’s absolutely free to boot!

Of course, if you’re Japanese, or fluent in Japanese as we are, you’d immediately contact a professional Japanese translation service. Let’s continue the experiment to see why.

Step 2: Japanese-to-English Translation
Next, we reverse translate the Japanese text back into English text.

If machine translation produces professional quality translation, we should get the original English text, or something pretty close, right?

Instead, you get gibberish, as seen by your target Japanese audience.

Machine translation vendors, perhaps in recognition of its poor utility, promote their wares as a “gisting” tool, to get the general idea of foreign language text. Let’s call it what is folks –

Gibberish, pure and simple!

Unfortunately many folks mistakenly believe free machine translation is a substitute for quality translation by qualified professional Japanese translators. However, they don’t realize the real damage they’re doing to their brand. Click here to see some real world examples

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About the Author
Ivan Vandermerwe is the CEO of SAECULII YK, owner of Tokyo based Translation Company Japan Visit SAECULII for the latest professional case studies, articles and news on Japanese Translation Service

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