Technology Tip Number 21
¿Qué tú dijo? What did you say?

ENGLISH Good morning, for today's technology tip I would like to show you some online machine translators. Unfortunately, as any foreign language teacher would tell you, machine translations aren't very good.

SPANISH Buenos días, por la tecnología de punta de hoy me gustaría que le muestre algunos traductores automáticos en línea. Por desgracia, como cualquier profesor de lengua extranjera le diría, las traducciones automáticas no son muy buenos.

FRENCH Bonjour, pour la pointe de la technologie d'aujourd'hui, je voudrais vous montrer quelques traducteurs automatiques en ligne. Malheureusement, comme tout professeur de langue étrangère vous dirait, les traductions automatiques ne sont pas très bonnes.

CHINESE 早上好，今天的技术提示，我想告诉你一些在线机器翻译。不幸的是，任何一门外语老师会告诉你，机器翻译是不是很好。

ARABIC صباح الخير، للطرف التكنولوجيا اليوم أود أن أعرض لكم بعض المترجمين الجهاز على الانترنت. لسوء الحظ، مثل أي معلم لغة أجنبية سوف اقول لكم، الترجمات عبر الالة ليست جيدة جدا.

In many ways the internet has been making the world a smaller place.  To help break down language barriers there are many free online language translation websites out there.  The translations are done by computers that simply match words from different languages together.  It's called a "machine translation."  Unfortunately the results are not always that good.  In the boxes above I used http://translate.google.com/ to translate the English text into other languages.  Looks pretty impressive doesn’t it?  Below I have translated the foreign languages back to English using the same translator.  The results speak for themselves:

ENGLISH Good morning, for today's technology tip I would like to show you some online machine translators. Unfortunately, as any foreign language teacher would tell you, machine translations aren't very good.

SPANISH Good morning, by the advanced technology of today I would like to show some online automatic translators. Unfortunately, like any foreign language teacher would say, the machine translations are not very good.

FRENCH Hello, to the forefront of today's technology, I want to show you some automatic online translators. Unfortunately, like any foreign language teacher would tell you, the machine translations are not very good.

CHINESE Good morning, today's technical tips, I want to tell you some online machine translation. Unfortunately, any one foreign language teacher will tell you that machine translation is not very good.

ARABIC Good morning, today's technology Party would like to introduce you to some of the translators on the Internet. Unfortunately, like any other foreign language teacher will tell you, the machine translations are not very good.

There are still some practical applications even for these primitive language translators.  For example, in computer class students use them to translate news stories from foreign languages.  In this way students could do a current event story from a foreign newspaper for instance.   Imagine growing up being able to get the gist of what is being said on the front pages of the world.

Google, Alta Vista as well as many other websites offer free machine translations of foreign language websites. 

I have listed a few of these sites below:

http://translate.google.com

http://www.babelfish.com/

http://www.freetranslation.com/

PRACTICE ACTIVITY:   Try translating an email from a friend or colleague into another language and then back to English using one of the machine translators listed above. If the results are funny share them.

TO KEEP ON LEARNING:  If you would like to learn more about how these translators work try searching the internet for:

Machine translator history
Machine translation problems
Funny translations

Looking for Something?