Lettre à Google Translate

Le nouveau président de l’association suisse des traducteurs, terminologues et interprètes (ASTTI) réagit au dixième anniversaire de l’application de traduction du moteur de recherche Google

«Cher petit frère,

«Google fête les 10 ans de son traducteur» (Le Temps du 23.5.2016). Nous t’imaginons avec un sourire ému souffler les bougies de ton gâteau d’anniversaire! Il faut admettre que depuis tes balbutiements en 2006, tu as fait de grands progrès. Tes 500 millions d’utilisateurs le prouvent. Ils doivent apprécier que tu puisses traduire plus de 100 milliards de mots dans une kyrielle de langues. Il y a bien sûr les téméraires qui te croient capable de leur fournir une traduction professionnelle.

Tes résultats parfois très drôles contribuent à nous faire rire, ce qui est, paraît-il, excellent pour la santé. Mentionnons aussi les inquiets, en quête de certitude pour un bref message, qui te considèrent un peu comme le temple des langues. D’autant que, si l’on en croit tes projets, tu leur susurreras bientôt tes traductions à l’oreille, tant à la plage qu’au restaurant. Peut-on imaginer meilleur complice dans notre société globalisée?

Dix ans… mais qui, à cet âge-là, peut se débrouiller à la perfection dans une ou plusieurs langues?

Il te faudra encore des années pour rivaliser avec le bagage linguistique et cognitif d’un humain qui a séché sur des textes juridiques, financiers ou scientifiques, dévoré des bibliothèques entières, s’est fait corriger et renseigner par des spécialistes, et conseille en connaissance de cause des clients peu satisfaits des approximations d’un enfant de dix ans…

Ignore les ébénistes inconditionnels du travail fait main, les rigoristes qui te cherchent noise pour une phrase incompréhensible. Les surhommes n’existent pas plus que les surmachines, et la tienne permet néanmoins de se renseigner à propos de tout et de rien, de survoler un article en chinois ou de saluer son voisin de palier néerlandais. Tu es plein de bonne volonté, avide d’apprendre et de t’améliorer, et tu as même l’honnêteté de te faire aider par 3,5 millions de bénévoles pour gommer les gros «bugs» inévitables.

Mais dans cette histoire, respecte notre droit d’aînesse, car l’Association suisse des traducteurs, terminologues et interprètes a derrière elle un demi-siècle d’expérience. Imagine ce que cela représente comme lignes, pages et ouvrages, recherches et connaissances acquises! C’est d’ailleurs ce qui justifie l’estime de nos clients. Peut-être qu’un jour… quand petit Google Translate sera grand… mais quoi qu’il en soit, un esprit humain cultivé, intuitif et curieux, sensible aux métaphores, aux styles et aux rimes  ̶  conscient de la nécessité de commenter l’intraduisible  ̶  gardera toujours sur toi une longueur d’avance.»

https://www.letemps.ch/opinions/2016/06/08/lettre-google-translate

---

Christoph Rüegger, nouveau président de l’association suisse des traducteurs, terminologues et interprètes (ASTTI), Berne

Language technologist: Europe needs a language infrastructure, not just Google Translate

Europe's language industry has lost ground to American technology companies. But it still has a chance to offer better services, says Jochen Hummel.

Jochen Hummel is Chairman of LT-Innovate, the European Association of the Language Technology Industry, he is also the CEO of ESTeam and Coreon.

He spoke with Christophe Leclercq, EurActiv’s Founder.

Could you start by telling me what LT-Innovate is about?

LT-Innovate is an association of European language technology companies. We have about 180 members, primarily SMEs in Europe, and companies from different areas of language technology like translation, text analytics, text recognition. All areas of language technology.

It seems that the European translation industry is losing out to American initiatives, notably Google Translate. Why is that?

You are referring to the European machine translation industry and technology, because when it comes to language services, Europe is of course very strongly positioned. When it comes to technology, indeed, European companies are not that good at marketing their products and deploying them as commercial solutions. We develop a lot. Even Google Translate was originally developed by a European. But when it comes to converting these into marketable products, we are not as good as the Americans. That is also what we are trying to address in LT-Innovate, to help our members to develop better market strategies and alliances.

It seems that there is a market opportunity combining machine translation, and very cheap post-editing by humans, which could be a kind of Uber for translation. Who could do that? Could it be a European company?

It surely could be. I have been asked this question before. The thing is, it cannot really be compared with something like driving a car or hosting people with Airbnb, because that is something that everybody can do. Translation is actually a pretty complex process, and managing it still requires humans. It requires project managers and so on. So far, we have failed to create platforms so that we can automate this management, but eventually it will come by consolidating technologies and making it easier to process translations. Eventually we will see will be from an Uber of translation, but where will it come from? Current attempts are more promising in the US, simply because they have managed to raise tens of millions of dollars. In the end, it will also be a question of funding.

Let’s talk a little bit about an industrial policy for the language technology sector. The EU is funding a number of R&D projects. That’s one way of bringing money into the system. But it is also potentially a very important client of such services. How could it organise its procurement in a smarter way?

That's right, the EU has been funding research in that area for decades, with some good results and some not so good results. But at the same time, the European Union is the biggest translation organisation in the world. Today, it spends over €1 billion per year financing that activity, so you can imagine how much money it could save by increasing productivity. And instead of funding research, it could also put out a call for tender and ask industry to deliver the kind of systems it would like. That would make industry more focused, and it could also lead to the delivery of better products in a quicker and more sustainable way.

So you would do away with the European officials that work as translators, and replace them with private sector service providers?

That’s not what I mean. Many of them work with very confidential documents, as civil servants, but they can only translate a fraction of what they are supposed to translate. It is a question of making them more productive and allowing them to focus on the interesting and creative part of their work, whilst automating the more repetitive tasks. A lot of gains could be made there. This would be a great way of advancing in the field of procurement, as the Americans are doing.

Finally, let’s turn to the private sector users. You have called for what you refer to as “language infrastructure”. What would it be and what would be its legal status?

It is a key aim of LT-Innovate to create something like a European language cloud, because when you develop language solutions, there are certain basic elements that you have to develop for each individual language. If you want to support ten languages you have to do them ten times. This is cost prohibitive for most companies, even big ones. So what we suggest is to have some sort of maintained language infrastructure that provides the basic language services, and on top of which companies can build their own solutions. As with other infrastructures, it should be run by a public or semi-public organisation, a non-profit organisation, which makes sure that it is accessible for every company and every user for a fair price and an optimal licencing scheme.

And it could be LT-Innovate itself that provides this?

Yes. As an organisation, LT-Innovate could operate such an infrastructure.

Google Translate error sees Spanish town advertise clitoris festival

Organisers in As Pontes ‘quite surprised’ to learn food festival celebrating Galician vegetable grelo had been mistranslated.

It was meant to be a culinary festival celebrating grelo, the leafy green vegetable that is a staple in the Galician town of As Pontes in north-west Spain.

But for the past few months, the small town was marketing a very different kind of festival after it used Google Translate to put the Galician word grelo into Castilian Spanish, ending up with it inviting people to take part in a “clitoris festival”.

“It was quite a surprise,” Montserrat García, the town’s spokesperson, told the Guardian. “At first, we didn’t believe what we were seeing.”

Local officials in As Pontes – population 11,000 – had written the announcement for the annual festival in Galician, one of the official languages of the northern Spanish region. They used Google Translate for the Spanish-language version of the text.

It meant the town’s “Feria do grelo” or rapini festival – held every February with tastings and awards for the best grelos – became “Feria clitoris” in Spanish.

The translated announcement read: “The clitoris is one of the typical products of Galician cuisine. Since 1981 ... the festival has made the clitoris one of the star products of its local gastronomy.”

García said the translation error was likely on the town’s official website for months before it was noticed late last week.

She believed the online translation tool mistook the Galician word for the Portuguese version, which refers to the vegetable but also can be used as slang for clitoris.

Officials in As Pontes are considering filing a formal complaint with Google. García said: “They should recognise Galician and translate it accurately.”

Google Translate has since changed the translation, with grelo now said to mean “brote” or sprout. But García remains dissatisfied: “It’s still not the best way of describing grelo, as it is a vegetable from the turnip family.”

Town officials have turned their backs on Google Translate, but there has been an upside to the embarrassing error, García said, as it caused a surge of interest in this year’s festival. “It’s become a means – albeit a very odd means – of promoting our festival.”

A Google spokesperson said: “Google Translate is an automatic translator – that is, it works without the intervention of human translators, using state-of-the-art technology instead. When Google Translate generates a translation, it looks for patterns in hundreds of millions of documents to help decide on the best translation for you.

“Since the translations are generated by machines, not all translation will be perfect and sometimes there will be mistakes or mistranslations. If people come across incorrect or inappropriate translations, they can let us know about them and we’ll be happy to fix them as soon as possible.”

_________________________________________

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/03/google-translate-error-as-pontes-spain-clitoris-food-festival-grelo-galicia?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Facebook?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Facebook

Ikea's 'Gosa Raps' Pillow Means 'Cuddle Rape' In English, According To Google Translate

Have you ever typed the name of Ikea’s "Gosa Raps" pillow into Google Translate? One Reddit user did just that and found that the nearly $50 pillow, specially designed for side sleepers, means “cuddle rape” in English if you ask Google’s translation service. The Huffington Post did the test ourselves and confirmed that that is indeed the case.

Ikea didn’t immediately return a voicemail message from HuffPost seeking comment.

There may be a legitimate reason behind the pillow’s name, as noted by one Reddit user in a comment on the post. The user, who claims to speak Swedish, pointed out that “raps” can also translate into Rapeseed, which is a type of flower or plant.

Many of the other pillows in the Gosa series translate into “Gosa + flower name.” For example, the company makes a “Gosa Tulpan” pillow, which means “Cuddle Tulip” in English, according to Google Translate.

The Swedish furniture-maker has ended up in an awkward spot before because of inadvertent product translations. After expanding into Thailand, the company discovered that the names of some of its items translated into crude names for sex and a term that’s very close to the Thai phrase for getting to third base. The company hired a team of Thai speakers to go through its product names and make sure none of them felt awkward in the language.

It's not that awkward translations are a Ikea-specific problem. Target announced earlier this month that it would be renaming its “Orina” sandal because the word means urine when translated from Spanish to English.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/15/ikea-gosa-raps-cuddle-rape_n_3085141.html