A Canadian family is traveling overseas with children when one of them whispers to her mom that she really, really, REALLY has to use the washroom. In other words, it’s an emergency. But how does this parent ask for the location of the restroom from someone who only speaks Turkish, Portuguese or Mandarin?
With a smartphone, that mom might be able to ask for help from Google Translate. The website lets someone type a word, phrase or more in English. Then it shows the equivalent words in Spanish — or any of more than 100 other languages. When people say “Google Translate,” they sometimes mean this website. Other times they may be using the phrase to inaccurately refer to any machine translation engine, which is what these computerized programs are known as. (Calling all of them Google Translate is like using the brand-name Kleenex to refer to any brand of tissues.)
Machine translation — or any type of translation, really — isn’t easy. Languages never match each other word for word. For example, think about the word “honeymoon.” This doesn’t mean that the moon is made of honey. If you want to say “honeymoon” in another language, you first have to think about what it really means: a trip people take after their wedding. That’s why the way you say “honeymoon” in French is “voyage de noces” — which literally means ”wedding trip.”
Meaning is more important than exact words when it comes to translating something into English, too. Pretend you’re French and your big sister is talking about her date. “You’re not going to believe it,” she says in French, but “he gave me a rabbit.” Of course, Frenchmen don’t show up for dates bearing bunnies, usually. The phrase — “Il m’a pose un lapin” — is a French idiom. It means “he stood me up.”
If translation challenges people, imagine how tricky it can be when teaching a computer to do it. And it has been hard. But programmers have been making great strides lately in helping electronic brains interpret “foreign” languages.
Here we look at many of the obstacles they’ve had to hurdle. Fortunately, the payoff for succeeding can be big: Different cultures will not have to give up their own languages — or, necessarily, learn a new one — to be understood throughout the world.