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9486 in the collection
French paper goes global, risks ridicule with translation
Ohanian Comment: This is so outrageous it's funny. Certainly it's proof that technology won't be replacing translators any time soon.
After reading the news items below, I went to the website. It's hard to find anything that makes any sense. According to the news article, the translation site is run by one person. They plan to add a second to "tweak" the English translation. Clearly, more than a tweak is needed to rescue this turkey. The author from Yahoo.tech insists the articles, though a bit odd, are understandable. Hmmm. I wondered whether this one is about a sex club or a restaurant:
- Our good food to be discovered
Discover each week with latribune.fr a good address to dine of in love, between professional friends or your lunches. Good appetite. To see
· A carpaccio of sturgeon of dream to the "Coffee Plum tree"
· Expatriation and calm guaranteed to Fontanarosa
· Wine & Marée make arrive the sea directly on its tables
Here are a few more headlines I found:
- Do you have the good passport?
- Latecomers: passage in review of the good ideas of holidays
- Poll Question:
Does one need a law to frame the wages of the owners?
yes
not
- Crispations with the National Assembly on Sunday work
· Adventures in crispations, the very discussed private bill on the derogations from the prohibition of work Sunday is discussed
By Rory Mulholland
PARIS (AFP) — A leading French business newspaper is launching a multi-lingual version of its website using automatic translation, dispensing with journalists but producing often comic results.
"Ryanair loan to make travel of the passengers upright," read a typically bizarre headline on La Tribune's site this week above a story in equally mangled English on the low-cost airline's plans to make people fly standing up.
"The Chinese car in ambush," "Internet Explorer: mistrust!" and "Assets of the continental right in management of the crisis" were some other mysterious headlines the same day on the site, which is still in an experimental phase.
But the paper's editors are confident that the project will, once the software is refined and a human hired to tweak the texts, open La Tribune to a potentially huge international audience.
"The aim is to be able to offer business news in different languages to reach a new public on the Internet," said Astrid Arbey, head of new media at the paper, France's second biggest-selling business daily.
The project involves the French website being translated in real time by computer software into English, German, Spanish and Italian, with Japanese and Chinese to come by the end of the year.
Most of the English articles on La Tribune's site were, with a little effort, understandable despite their many linguistic oddities.
But it is generally accepted that translation software cannot, as Google Translate admits on its site, "approach the fluency of a native speaker or possess the skill of a professional translator."
Arbey acknowledged that the results on La Tribune were still far from ideal, but said that the software was being continually updated and that within a few months it would achieve "almost perfect" news articles.
Britain's BBC has an entirely different model for the news website it provides in 30 different languages, staffed by hundreds of journalists, and says it has no plans to cut costs by following La Tribune's lead.
Spokesman Mike Gardner, who declined to comment directly on the French paper's approach, said that some of the BBC's online content was translated, but that this was always done by journalists.
"The whole point is that if you want news that has a resonance, you want journalists doing that," he said.
In Spain, the EFE news agency has been using computers for years to translate Spanish copy into Portuguese and Catalan. But all the copy is revised by editors before being published.
"This system is possible because Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan are similar languages," said an agency spokesman. "But we don't think it is possible for English, for example, and we have translators for our English service."
La Tribune currently has one person dealing with the foreign language sites and plans to soon hire another person to tweak the English-language articles, said Arbey.
That approach, say some journalists at the paper, is typical of the cost-cutting mentality of Alain Weill, the media entrepreneur who bought the daily last year.
"The quality (of the foreign-language sites) is really mediocre because there is no journalistic intervention," said one journalist, who asked not to be named.
Worse, he said, the sites "damage the image of La Tribune," which in France has a reputation as a serious newspaper aimed at the banking, financial and business world.
No other French newspaper has gone down this road, said the journalist, because they know that automatic translation "doesn't work in journalism."
But Arbey is nevertheless confident that the foreign language sites will soon be producing clean copy thanks to ongoing software improvements and the intervention of the human being the paper plans to hire.
Will they be able to end sentences like these ones in the Ryanair story?
"Ryanair plays the provocation once more. After the paying toilets, ones surtaxes for the largest passengers, Ryanair would plan to make travel part of its passengers upright!"
The jury will have to remain out until the experimental phase -- the site is only sporadically viewable on the web at the moment -- is over.
Automatic translation of La Tribune site garbles the news
Posted by Liz Webber
In a bid to increase its international audience, the French business newspaper La Tribune has begun using software to translate its website into English, German, Spanish and Italian. Unfortunately for the paper, the cost-saving measure of automatic translation produces some confusing results.
A current headline on the English-language site reads: "The United States: confidence of the consumers in Bern, reduced trade deficit," which appears to make a serious error in geography. What do American consumers have to do with the Swiss capital?
Switching back to the French version reveals US consumers are "en berne" - an expression literally translated as "at half-mast." In this case the actual direct translation makes more sense than what the software came up with ("Berne" being the French spelling of the Swiss city), as the point of the article is that the consumer confidence index dropped quite a bit in July. Overall, a great amount of effort was required to understand a fairly simple idea.
Astrid Arbey, the chief of new media at La Tribune, told AFP that while there are some problems with the software now, in a few months time all the bugs will be worked out. The newspaper plans to modify certain elements of the computer program and hire someone to edit the English-language version. Currently, one person oversees all the translated sites.
The AFP article compares La Tribune's practices to Spanish news agency EFE, which has long used translation software to transform its articles into Catalan and Portuguese. However, the three languages are very similar so drastic errors are less common, and editors read every word before it is sent out.
An anonymous La Tribune staffer decried the automatic translation, declaring the sites "damage the image" of the newspaper. At the very least, it is sure to invite a number of jokes at the paper's expense.
AFP asserts that most La Tribune articles are understandable despite the errors. Yet with headlines like "The going publics set out again upwards in the world" and "Japan limed in deep deflation," will anyone take the time to seriously read the stories?
Visiting the site is also a lesson in patience, as it appears the translation software runs each time a user clicks on a link, resulting in unusually long page-load times. All in all, there are a number of factors deterring visitors from considering La Tribune's translated sites as a serious source of news. Perhaps the newspaper should have worked through all the problems internally before launching this funny, unintelligible and sometimes downright misleading experiment.
— Rory Mulholland
Yahoo.tech
2009-07-10
http://translate.latribune.fr/turl/http-www.latribune.fr/fr_en?systranprofile=3
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
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