The assassin who stabbed Bush

Google's translation tools are used by increasing numbers of people to get the gist of news articles and other web pages written in foreign languages. But like most machine-generated language, Google's translations do not always make sense.

A Danwei reader sent in Google's translation for the English word "flippant". It comes out as "刺杀布什的凶手" or "the assassin who stabbed Bush" (see this screen shot).

Rather odd. But here's how Google explains the way their translations are produced:

[W]e feed the computer billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. We then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model. We've achieved very good results in research evaluations.

Google seems to have defined the Chinese translation of "flippant" by looking at a Guardian article by Charlie Booker that hinted that someone should assasinate George Bush. After a public outcry, the paper issued an apology that read, in part: "Although flippant and tasteless, his closing comments were intended as an ironic joke, not as a call to action..."

A Chinese summary of the affair includes the words 刺杀布什的凶手 in close proximity to the translation of the apology, so that, or something very similar, is probably responsible for Google's translation error.

Which poses a question: Is this a sad indicator of how seldom the word "flippant" is translated between English and Chinese?

This article is from Danwei.org

Read the complete post at http://www.danwei.org/language/the_assassin_who_stabbed_bush.php