Will Google’s instant phone translator kill the translation industry?

In the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the yellow Babel Fish was a universal translator capable of translating any language when placed in the ear. Google is currently developing software for the first phone capable of translating foreign languages almost instantly like the Babel Fish. The software should be able to understand a caller’s voice and translate it into a synthetic equivalent in a foreign language just like a professional human interpreter. To do so Google is combining a voice recognition system with Google Translate. Will this new tool mean the end of the translation industry?

Machine translations have become very popular and they have made significant improvements in quality. Google Translate, with over 70 million daily visitors, is currently leading the machine translation revolution.  Until 2007, Google used Systran technology to deliver automated translations.  That year they started using their own system. Google experts started feeding the computers with billions of words of text and examples of human translations between diverse languages. Google does not provide the computers languages and grammar rules; it lets them discover the rules for themselves by analyzing million of documents that have been translated by human translators. The computer establishes the pattern and uses them as a basis for future translations.

The problem is that for those languages with fewer documents available, there will be fewer patterns and therefore the quality of the translation will be poorer than the ones which involve more popular languages.

The new software, likewise Google Translate, is likely to become more accurate, the most it used due to the fact that as more data is added, more patterns will be established and the quality will improve.

In theory, this new tool will put a personal interpreter to the user’s disposal without any hassle. If it works as planned, it will be a big step towards the end of the language barriers. To start discussing the level of accuracy, we should first see what the project outcome is. At present, the level of accuracy of machine translation, despite of all the improvements, is quite precarious. Computers cannot understand the context where the translation is placed and they are not able to distinguish between the different varieties that a language might have. A human translator is able to adapt the text to make it culturally suitable to the intended audience. Professional translators also put at disposal their creativity and writing skills to find the most appropriate expression in order to convey the intended meaning. These skills are particularly useful when it comes to literary and marketing translations.

The main challenges of the Google’s instant phone translator include the ability to understand the languages nuances and to cope with the different accents. At present, there is not any machine translation that could understand the complexities and nuances of a language as human translator do. Nevertheless, the future might be full of surprises. In the words of David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at Bangor University: “The future, though, looks very interesting. If you have a Babel Fish, the need to learn foreign languages is removed.”

Challenging times are coming ahead for translation companies. However, saying that human professional translation services will be replaced by computer translations is equivalent to saying that computers will start writing literature and making art. Our MD at Quick Lingo, says “What we are seeing here is the changes coming to the free machine translation software and it’s fair to say that Google is continuing to challenge and improve these free translation services. It’s also fair to say that the changes and updates in the free translation service category will not lead to significant changes to the professional human translations simply because the free service is not 100% accurate in terms of linguistic accuracy, cultural understandings, the client’s exact needs and failure to understand the purpose and audience of the translation”.

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