Lost in translation

The best thing about the internet is the wealth of information you would otherwise never have access to. The information does you little good though if you can't understand it. As non-English speaking, and especially non-Western countries, become more integrated with the internet this problem will only grow larger.

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Some efforts at providing translation tools have been made. However, they suffer from numerous imperfections. For example, let's say I want to read Dutch coverage of yesterday's referendum on the EU constitution. I head over the Algemeen Dagblad website and read their lead story. The second paragraph reads:

De opkomst bij het eerste referendum in 200 jaar was hoger dan verwacht (63%). ,,Natuurlijk doet het pijn, maar de bevolking is heel duidelijk geweest. Het Nederlandse nee moet recht worden gedaan'', zei een teleurgestelde premier Balkenende. ,,Europa is te veel een zaak geweest van de politiek, te weinig van de burger.'' Het kabinet weigert consequenties te trekken uit de uitslag. Volgens staatssecretaris Nicolaï (Europese Zaken) had een andere campagne geen andere uitslag opgeleverd. Kamerlid Wilders dient vandaag een motie van wantrouwen in tegen het kabinet. Naar verwachting krijgt die nauwelijks steun.

Babelfish, a popular internet translation tool, translates it as the following:

The rise at the first referendum in 200 years had been expected higher than (63%). , of course it does pain, but the population has been very clear. Dutch no right must be done '', said a disappointed premier Balkenende. , Europe a matter has too much been of political, too a little of the citizen.' ' The cabinet refuses draw consequences from the result. According to State Secretary Nicolaï (European matter) another campaign had produced no other result. Member of Parliament Wilders gives notice of today a motion of mistrust against the cabinet. According to the expectations that hardly support gets.

Somewhat helpful, but clearly a good amount is lost in the translation. Its usefulness is further hindered by the limited number of languages it translates. I was fortunate with Dutch. If I wanted to translate from, say, Hungarian, I'd be out of luck.

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Fortunately help appears to be on the way:

"Nobody in my team is able to read Chinese characters," says Franz Och, who heads Google's machine-translation (MT) effort. Yet, they are producing ever more accurate translations into and out of Chinese - and several other languages as well.

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To demonstrate the software's prowess, Mr. Och displayed an Arabic newspaper headline at a recent media tour of Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. One commercially available MT program translated it: "Alpine white new presence tape registered for coffee confirms Laden." Then he displayed the translation from Google's prototype, which made considerably more sense: "The White House Confirmed the Existence of a New Bin Laden tape."

Google -- what can't they do?