Round-trip translation

A round-trip translation is a recreational spin-off of machine translation and computer-assisted translation software, such as Systran's and Altavista/Yahoo!'s Babel Fish language translation tools. The user usually starts by translating a block of text in their native tongue to a foreign language and then back into their native tongue. With the inaccuracies of modern machine translation the result is typically much different than the original text.

Inaccuracies

In as much as translation between two distinct, living languages is never an exact science, the current state of computer translation tools makes this more evident. Small glitches in the translation can easily be exploited in repetition, becoming more pronounced as errors pass from one language to another. As one website explains it, "translation software is almost good enough to turn grammatically correct, s _fr. last= Loewenstein|first= Werner|title= The Touchstone of Life|pages= 188] , a language translation machine was experimented with for translating the Bible from English to Spanish. It apparently "did quite quite well until it got to Matthew 26:41: 'the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.' The translation read: '"el aguardiente es agradable pero la carne es insipida"' (the liquor is nice but the meat is bland)." Competing versions of the story have surfaced as far back as 1990. In 2000, a reviewer of the same book mentions a English-Russian-English version he is aware of [http://www.chris-winter.com/Erudition/Reviews/W_Loewenstein/Touchstone.html] , as does a 1999 Snopes article [http://www.snopes.com/language/misxlate/machine.htm] .

In Philip K. Dick's 1969 novel "Galactic Pot Healer", a character passes the time at his boring job by playing a game involving round-trip translations and a world-wide computer network. A typical instance of the game involves one person translating an English book title into a different language (e.g. Japanese) and back. Then another person tries to guess the original title. It was a remarkably accurate description of games that can be played with online translation tools.

Examples of round-trip translation are not limited to automatic translation tools. Mark Twain published a literal re-translation into English of a French translation of his 1865 short story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County [ [http://www.angelfire.com/nb/classillus/images/jumping/jumping.html The Notorious Jumping Frog Of Calaveras County by Mark Twain ] ] .

Best round-trip languages

While machine translation advances continue, when using the currently available technology, the quality of the end result in a round-trip translation depends on the similarity of the languages used. For that matter, most inter-European language translations can be comprehended with varying humorous values. Asian-European trials, however, usually produce complete gibberish, thus losing a relevant connection with the original.Or|date=June 2008

ee also

* Evaluation of machine translation

Further reading

* Gaspari, F. (2006) "Look Who's Translating. Impersonations, Chinese Whispers and Fun with Machine Translation on the Internet" in "Proceedings of the 11th Annual Conference of the European Association of Machine Translation"
* Somers, H. (2005) " [http://www.co.umist.ac.uk/~harold/RoundTrip.doc Round-trip Translation: What Is It Good For?] "

References

External links

* [http://babelfish.altavista.com/ Babel Fish Translation Service]
* [http://lanbee.com/node/3488/en/es/Round-trip%20translation%20example Lanbee Translation & References]
* [http://www.tashian.com/multibabel/ Lost in Translation (round-trip translation)]
* [http://www.emarketbrasil.com/Circular-Translator.cgi?mode=Traduza Round-Trip-Translation Tool]
* [http://www.reallymagazine.com/2Xlation.htm Really Magazine's 2Xlation facility] automatic round-trip translator for viewing webpages (beta)