You may know Babelfish from Yahoo (ex-Altavista). Did you know that Google Translate exists as well? As they are computer-processed automatic translations, the quality often varies from funny to quite accurate. But overall, Google Translate seems to give much better quality.

Babelfish (named after a small language-translating fish one places into one’s ear in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books) sometimes gives hilarious translations when some terms are left untranslated, or translated with the wrong meaning of the same word.

Quality-wise, I find Google Translate better compared to my experiences with Babelfish. Most things are in fact translated.

Somehow my colleagues at work seem to be experts in finding out really strange Finnish-translations for normal Swedish phrases. I don’t remember details, but for example “moi mukulat” (a TV-show for children in Sweden, curiously with a Finnish name meaning “hi little kids”) is translated as “moi knölar”. It’s right, but it’s not right, as in Finnish mukula can mean both a small kid and a lump or a tuberous root of a plant, and without knowing any better of the context, Google Translate picks the meaning for lumps. Hello lumps!

Google Translate used to have a problem (this has since been fixed it seems) when translating a phrase like “I can talk English” to Swedish. The result was “Jag kan prata svenska” which means “I can talk Swedish” – it seemed to translate the language name as the target language, not what you actually wanted.

Another, more Babelfishian example:

“The capital of Sweden is Stockholm.”

This translated into Finnish is:

“Pääoma Ruotsi on Tukholma”

It ends up weird in a very Babelfish-like way, as “pääoma” means capital in the economical sense instead of the capital in the sense of center of government for a nation – other than that it’s quite OK: “Capital Sweden is Stockholm”. One understands the meaning with a little imagination.

Let’s try next the famous starting phrase from William Gibson’s book Neuromancer:

“The sky over the port was the color of a television set, tuned to a dead channel.”

How does Google Translate clear this?

Taivas yli satamassa oli väri Television, viritettävä kuollut kanava.

Well… it means something like “Sky over in the port belonged to a color Television, tuneable dead channel”. It’s a bit nonsensical, someone who does not know the original quote might surely miss the meaning.

And how about:

“A later landmark in Indian mathematics was the development of the series expansions for trigonometric functions.”

This is translated as

“A[sic] myöhemmin maamerkki Intian matematiikka oli kehittämiseen sarja laajennuksia, trigonometriset funktiot.”

which means something like “A later landmark Indian mathematics was into development a series of extensions, the trigonometric functions”. It’s quite close, the meaning can be understood easily, but it’s easily detected as a slightly dodgy machine-made translation.

Luckily there is a “suggest a better translation” button in Google Translate. Human-assisted translation for certain phrases can only improve the quality, I think.

It would be interesting to know how Google Translate works in detail. Such details are, of course, not available. However, there is a FAQ with some interesting information.