Tales Across The Sea

5 Responses to “Zhonglish in New York”

1. Mei Posted: Jun 21st, 2010 at 9:31 pm

   1 Haha, this is great! I went straight to online translators, and found that in this case the bad translation didn’t come from an online tool after all. Both Google and Yahoo translators did an ok (though far from “good”) job translating the warning. However, feeding the results from one translator to another, and then back, could produce very interesting results. Below is the result of putting the Cyclone warning through Google Translate and Babel Fish (Yahoo’s translator). Original: The cyclone roller coaster is a high impact ride. Any person with back, neck, or heart problems should not ride this ride. No pregnant person should ride. Hold on with both hands. After Google Translater: 旋风过山车是一种高影响乘坐。任何人与背部，颈部，或心脏问题，不能坐这车程。没有怀孕的人应该坐。就用双手按住。 Feed that into Yahoo Translater: The tornado roller coaster is one kind of high influence rides. Anybody with the back, the pate, or the heart question, cannot sit this driving distance. Has not been pregnant the human should sit. Uses both hands to hold down. Google again: 龙卷风过山车是一类高影响游戏机。与背部，颈部或心脏问题，任何人都不能坐这个车程。尚未怀孕的人应该坐下。使用双手按住。 Yahoo again: The tornado roller coaster is one kind affects the mechanical games high. With the back, the pate or the heart question, anybody cannot sit this driving distance. Not yet is pregnant the human should sit down. Uses both hands to hold down. Google again: 龙卷风是一种过山车影响较高的机械游戏。由于背部，颈部或心脏的问题，任何人不能坐在这个驾驶距离。尚未怀孕的人应该坐下来。使用双手按住。 Yahoo again: The tornado is one kind of roller coaster influence high machinery game. As a result of the back, the pate or heart’s question, anybody cannot sit in this driving distance. Not yet is pregnant the human should sit down. Uses both hands to hold down. Google again: 龙卷风是一种过山车影响力高机械游戏。由于背部，颈部或心脏的问题的结果，任何人不能坐在这个驾驶距离。尚未怀孕的人应该坐下来。使用双手按住。 Yahoo again: The tornado is one kind of roller coaster influence high machinery game. As a result of the back, the pate or heart’s question’s result, anybody cannot sit in this driving distance. Not yet is pregnant the human should sit down. Uses both hands to hold down. Google again: 龙卷风是一种过山车影响力高机械游戏。由于背部，颈部或心脏的问题的结果的结果，任何人不能坐在这个驾驶距离。尚未怀孕的人应该坐下来。使用双手按住。 After several more rounds between Google and Yahoo translators, the result seem to stabilize except for the second sentence. Google appears to keep adding on “的结果” (results) to it, so we end up having a Chinese translation out of Google like this — I’m sure you can end up with any number of 的结果 appended if you keep doing this: 龙卷风是一种过山车影响力高机械游戏。由于背部，颈部或心脏的问题的结果的结果的结果的结果的结果，任何人不能坐在这个驾驶距离。尚未怀孕的人应该坐下来。使用双手按住。 One final round of translation by Yahoo to get us back to English: The tornado is one kind of roller coaster influence high machinery game. As a result of the back, the pate or heart’s question’s result’s result’s result’s result’s result, anybody cannot sit in this driving distance. Not yet is pregnant the human should sit down. Uses both hands to hold down. This endless piling up of “results” might be a result of Google’s machine-learning based translation algorithm. With strong machine-learning you can get fairly good results in many cases, but occasionally you do need to have a sense of sentence and phrase structure in order to avoid piling up endless “results” when doing back-and-forth translation. Given the fun I had simply cutting and pasting between Google and Yahoo, perhaps the two companies can consider teaming up to make a fun online game out of their translators.

2. Mei Posted: Jun 21st, 2010 at 9:45 pm

   2 Lara and I already found out that Google or Yahoo translators cannot handle Old Chinese very well. But as i was playing with them today, it turns out modern Chinese with a more informal tone can give them a hard time as well. Here is one example taken from the “Super Adorable Liu Ba” article: Original 三顾茅庐的传奇，世人已经熟到不能再熟。但是，如果以为诸葛亮是刘备寻访贤才的过程中，最为辛苦的一个，那你就错了。 Google Translator: Highlighting the legend, the world has been cooked to a no longer familiar. However, if the look for talented people that Zhuge Liang is the process of Liu Bei, the most difficult one, you’re wrong. Yahoo’s Babel Fish: Repeatedly asks the legend, the common people were already ripe to cannot be again ripe. But, if thought that Zhuge Liang is Liu Bei looks for in talent’s process, most laborious, then you were wrong. As a reference, here is Mei & Lara’s translation: The three visits to the straw cottage has to be our best-known legend. But if you think getting Zhuge Liang was Liu Bei’s most arduous recruiting task, you’d be wrong. Looks like both Google and Yahoo gave up on translating “The three visits”, even though it’s readily documented in any dictionary of Chinese idioms.

3. ram Posted: Aug 16th, 2010 at 3:05 pm

   3 I like the iterative translations! I wonder why they (Yahoo) don’t use a spelling or grammar checker, which should have caught some of the mistakes. I put the final translation from Yahoo of the Cyclone into Microsoft Word. The spelling & grammar checker objected to “result’s”, saying that the apostrophe was not correct. I was expecting it to catch more, since even in the first sentence “influence” should be “influenced”. Following Word’s suggestion, I removed the apostrophes, to make it “results results results”, which the Word grammar checker catches. Interesting, if you put the same sentences into Google Docs, which has a spell checker, then it doesn’t catch the mistakes. I guess despite their fancy translation technology, Google Docs lags in some simpler things like spelling and grammar.

4. Lara Posted: Nov 15th, 2010 at 5:01 am

   4 Actually the rot sets in early, in Yahoo’s translation of “head” as “pate” – a word nobody, but nobody uses, possibly excepting the phrase “bald pate.” Adherence to quaintly antiquated vocabulary initiates the spiral of escalating wierdness – you’d think there would be some mechanism for calculating the frequency of use of various words in modern idiomatic English, and minimizing the appearance of strangely old-fashioned verbiage – especially in a roller coaster warning, or in this case a high influence machinery game warning.

5. Lara Posted: Jan 25th, 2012 at 11:28 am

   5 I also like the consistent translation of “no pregnant person” to “not yet pregnant human,” as if everyone who isn’t pregnant is about to become so. Part of the fault is in the original: why say “No pregnant person should ride” when you mean “Pregnant women should not ride”? The translator can’t handle the movement of the negative meaning from the noun to the verb, while it’s super easy for a human to do it. And why “person” instead of “woman”? It’s not as if pregnant men will protest.