Juan Roberto Guzman, who lives in Mexico, regularly e-mails his English-speaking virtual friends in Canada, England and the United States. Because Guzman reads and writes only Spanish, he uses StarMedia’s online translator to communicate with his buddies.
“It’s so easy and useful. I use it all the time at work and also at home,” said the 31-year-old librarian at the Intercontinental University in Mexico, who met his virtual friends in a chat room. He also uses translation services to locate texts in foreign publications. “You only put in the phrase and it gets translated.”
More and more people like Guzman are shattering language barriers as they use online translators to communicate with people from Chile to China. Online translation allows users to cultivate virtual friendships, learn a new language and read newspapers in their native tongue.
But the online translation services are far from perfect. In fact, they’re only about 70 percent accurate and can produce comical translations.
Take these lyrics from the Beatles:
“When I find myself in times of trouble
Mother Mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.”
After translating it into Spanish and back into English, the result is: “When to find me to same me at times of the Maria mother of the hardship I come to me the words from speech from the wisdom, let to be.”
Despite the imperfections, online translators are incredibly popular. BabelFish (http://babelfish.altavista.com) already performs more than 30 million translations a month and Translate.com said it executes 8 million translations a month.
Yupi, which has a link called Traduccion, said its translation feature is among its top five services.
Other portals that translate text in major languages–English, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Japanese and Chinese–include Excite, Lycos, StarMedia, Terra, Quepasa, Guay and FreeTranslation.com.
While business people are using the software to conduct online meetings, teachers are using it for the educational value.
Bob Ellis, a teacher at JFK Middle School in North Miami Beach, Fla., used ePals, a classroom exchange site, to hook up students with pen pals in China, Russia and Germany, who communicate using the site’s online translator.
“I was delighted from the way kids learned,” Ellis said. “It’s just amazing that they can be doing things with students in other countries with other cultures.”
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Giorgi Martins Rodrigues, a military pilot in the Brazilian Air Force, said he uses a service to translate Web pages from Portuguese into English and vice versa. “I use it mainly when I’m reading or writing my e-mails and I don’t understand a word or expression or I can’t read it in English,” said the 35-year-old.
He said he doesn’t like to use it during chats because chats are immediate.
When StarMedia wanted to find out if customers were using its translation service, it deactivated its service and got more than 40 responses from people clamoring to get it back.
“I hope you [activate] the online translator again. It is of great necessity in my work, especially because I’m learning the language,” wrote Luis Gabriel Ollivares.
Someone else added: “I hope you put the translator back, but hopefully it will be more advanced.”
Experts in the translation field are trying to improve the services. Machine translation requires enormous databases and a level of understanding that is required to include context as well as definitions.