overcoming language barriers

On Feb 28 I discovered and installed the Global Translator plugin for Wordpress. The plugin supports 4 different translation engines, with Google providing by far the most choices. I built a short list of friends who are native (or at least fluent) speakers of many of the available languages, configured the plugin for source language English and those options for target languages (SV IT ES FR PL HI EL DE zh-CN zh-TW KO JA), then I "called in favors" to test the plugin. Within a week, the verdicts were pretty much in.

Conclusion? Most of my testers expressed the opinion that it was more confusing, funnier, or both to read the translation than to cope with the English. The Asian languages were especially noted as not being well done. The European languages which are closest to the origins of English, not surprisingly, seemed to fare the best.

Certainly the content of this blog, which focuses on software development, is not representative of everything that anyone might want to translate from English to another language, or from another language to English. The engine may handle general personal correspondence much better, and given that Google just announced this week that they now support built-in translation in Gmail, that's probably the focus of their engine development efforts. I expect the capabilities of translation engines will continue to improve, and I plan to monitor them. But for my purposes, I don't think they are anywhere near ready for 'industrial' use yet.

I know I am lucky to have such great, helpful friends!  Thanks to Elizabeth, Sayuri, Qingfeng, Aldo, Dright, Yonghee, Sami, Jan, and Jim for their kindness and assistance.