Google: World's Largest Translation Company?

Looks like Google is entering another business - translation.

According to the Google explanations on the frontpage and their product overview page, we can see this is meant to be a translation service which offers both volunteers and professional translators... and I suppose at least the professionals will want to get paid. In that regards, the service is in the field of sites like Click2Translate.com (a service by the company which Tony works for, incidentally, and which I’m often using for some of my sites).

But what is really interesting reading at the moment is a translator's view on what Google will do and how it will profit. According to Brian McConnell, a problem for machine translation is its need for pairs of directly (and, presumably, well) translated sentences. The systems then build a statistical analysis to let them swap out phrases to pull together a translation.

Unfortunately, the sources of material are usually governmental bureaucratic meanderings, hence the questionable quality of the results. What Google offers is the possibility of a centralized repository to build an incredibly useful database of translations, which might improve the quality of machine translation. If you've wondered about how writing moves from one language into another, this should be interesting.

The Nabokov Dilemma

Apparently, Dmitri Nabokov, the 73-year-old son and translator of writer Vladimir Nabokov, has a dilemma: whether to destroy his father's last literary work or make it available, in an unfinished form, to the world. I remember writing an article on literary executors. One of the discussions I had with an expert was the experience of Franz Kafka's executor. Kafka wanted all of his manuscripts destroyed, and yet the executor, a friend of his, decided instead to let them be published.

It would have been a pity if books like The Fall had never been available for reading. But there is a difference, I think, between completed books and a collection of index cards that might have the equivalent of 30 manuscript pages - not the same as a finished work. And yet, what do you do when you have control over such a hot literary property? I can understand why Dmitri Nabokov hesitates, though inclining to destryong them. But it's a pitty that he mentioned them in the first place, then. At his death, Kafka was not known broadly as a writer, so the decision was, perhaps, easier. But once Nobokov let the cat out of the bag, I can see how the pressure can mount. As I've yet to read a greater or lesser novel by the Russian, it's hard for me to summon forth the dudgeon necessary to literary angst. So much for ever becoming a Critic.

French Teen Arrested for Posting Potter Translation

French police arrested a 16-year old from Aix-en-Provence for posting his own translation of the final Harry Potter novel before the release of the official version, scheduled for October. According to the Reuters story, here's what a representative of Gallimard, publisher of the sanctioned French version of the novels, said:

"It is not a young person or a fan we are talking about here -- these are organized networks that use young people," she told Reuters by telephone.

Networks using young people? Oh, right, there are criminal networks recruiting young people to surrepticiously translate large novels from one langauge to another and then to post their work on the web, removing any chance of making money off their effort. The criminal networks, concerned that they seem to be making nothing from their enterprises, are said to be planning to retain consultants to help analyze their business models.

No Puckering Up in Spanish

Randy Hecht, a bilingual colleague and friend, told me a funny story about an article she was doing. For this to make sense, you have to understand that sometimes she writes in English and sometimes in Spanish. She was actually trying to put something into Spanish about an experience she had in Mexico and needed to describe someone puckering his mouth, indicating that he wanted a kiss. But she didn't know the Spanish word for pucker. She checked one dictionary after another and couldn't find it. She checked with her extensive set of Latino friends and colleagues and finally, in a last bit of exasperation, checked with Edith Grossman, something that both of us have interviewed int he past and one of the leading Spanish to English translators in the world. (She's Gabriel Garcia Marquez's translator.) The upshot that there doesn't appear to be any Spanish word or phrase for puckering up. When Randy told me this, I started laughing, not only because it was funny on its own, but because I realized that there is also the English word purse, so we've got not just one, but two ways of visibly preparing for a kiss. Guess that in Latino parts of the world they just jump right in and don't waste time making funny faces and staring at each other.

When the Writing Is On the Wall - Or T-Shirt

There are many stories of companies that ended up looking foolish, or worse, when they tried crossing the gulf that language translation can be. Here's another case, where a British menswear store sold shirts with a Russian ethnic cleansing slogan - in Russian, of course, that no one bothered to have translated to be sure.