25.7.11

Human translation telephone

A couple of months ago, I read an article about the "translation telephone" powered by Google Translate. You have probably read about it too, just as about the "Bad translator" that I came across this morning.
I had my fun with that, tried out a few sentences and mostly, when I started with a Slovak sentence, the resulting sentence was utter nonsense, sometimes ridiculous.
It's too easy to make fun of computer "translators", they have no possibility to defend themselves. And they can only give us what they have been "taught"by humans.
But let's test the "human translation telephone".
My idea is that I'd start with a sentence in Slovak and ask someone to translate that into his or her mother tongue and forward this translated sentence to the next person with passive knowledge of the new source language. I'd like to have my original sentence translated at least 19 times, to imitate what the "translation telephone" does. The 19th translation should be into either English or German or French so that I could have it translated by someone into Slovak ... someone who doesn't know my original.
I think it would be quite interesting to see, how much of the original gets through or gets lost in this "translation Chinese whispers". So I'm calling my fellow linguists, if you want to help me with this little experiment, send me an email. Let me know your active and passive languages. It would be fun to include someone with non-European languages or languages not written in the Latin Alphabet. I'm looking forward to hearing from you!

2 comments:

  1. Can't find your e-mail so I comment instead. I'd be happy to Swedish A, English, French and Danish as working languages.

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  2. Sorry, the email is hidden as a link under "email" in the text. It's mamlyn@prolingo.sk

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