Round-trip translation

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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. A user may start translating a block of text between languages to arrive back in the original language, albeit with a derivative end result. The goal of round-trip translations is usually amusement, so while variances are desirable, whether or not they are actually amusing is a subjective call.

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[edit] Example

The following passage shows the result of translating the above paragraph ("A round-trip translation..." up to "...is a subjective call") in the sequence English -> Japanese -> English using Yahoo! Babel Fish:

"As for round trip travelling translation Systran' Amusement spin off of machine translation and the computer invocation translation software the way, is; s and AltaVista or Yahoo! ' The language translation equipment of s Babelfish. Perhaps the user with the source language which uses the derivative final returns, with say it starts translating the clause between languages in order to arrive. As for purpose of round trip travelling translation while usual fluctuation is desirable, amusement, therefore, whether or not those really it is funny, there is the subjective call which is"

[edit] Ingredients to humorous outcomes

For amusement to take place, the translation must have both of the fundamental elements of humour. First, it must have relevance, it must bear some resemblance to the original and thereby intellectually engage the audience. Next, it must have some surprise factor or twist.

Round-trip translation is often spoofed by comedian Jay Leno in his weekly Headlines segment on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. He will often take an English "round-trip translation" of a document or menu written on a foreign language - usually Chinese - and read it aloud to show how absurd the results are.

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, slang-free text from one language into grammatically incorrect, barely readable approximations in another. But the software is not equipped for 10 consecutive translations of the same piece of text. The resulting half-English, half-foreign, and totally non sequitur response bears almost no resemblance to the original. Remember the old game of 'Telephone'? Something is lost, and sometimes something is gained. [1]"

[edit] History

Apparently, arriving at surprising destinations with machine translation is not an altogether recent phenomenon, and may date back to the inception of the software in the 1950s and the 1960s. According to Werner R. Loewenstein's The Touchstone of Life, 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, however, and in 2000, a reviewer of the same book mentions a English-Russian-English version he is aware of [2], as does a 1999 Snopes article[3].

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 Babel Fish and the internet.

People have long recognized the humor potential in the loss of exactness each time a work is translated; while a computer makes the process easy, it is by no means necessary. As one pre-computer example, 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[4].

[edit] Best round-trip languages

While machine translation advances continue, when using the currently available Systran Babel Fish 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. Hence, the translation, along with its entertainment value, becomes suspect (see for yourself), and at best, may result in confused or nervous laughter.

[edit] Examples

Round trip translation can illustrate features of languages in a droll fashion, useful for language teachers. For example, on one free translation site, the child's expression "hey Mister, get your ass off my bunny" (said to an adult on a bus who sat mistakenly on the child's toy bunny) becomes "gentleman, obtain the donkey from my rabbit baby" in Chinese. This shows that Mister can be used disrespectfully in American English in such a way that it no longer corresponds to the Chinese word for "gentleman" and that Chinese lacks a single word for "bunny".

[edit] See also

[edit] 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) "Round-trip Translation: What Is It Good For?"

[edit] External links