Translation

If you or your kids are big Dr. Seuss fans, then you know The Lorax arrived in theaters last week. You may not know that Danny DeVito, one of the stars of the animated film, is also lending his voice to the Italian, Spanish, German and Russian versions.

When the phone rang at 5:00 on Friday night and a guy named Daniel said he needed the text of a Swazi marriage video translated into English by Monday morning, my first thought was no way. There were other urgent projects that I still had to finalize! Swazi! Who speaks that language? This is going to be an expensive project because it was a rare language, Friday night, a video, and RUSH!

Have you ever been to a foreign country and been unable to decipher the labels on cans or bottles?  I have spent absurd amounts of time looking for hair products in foreign stores because I wasn't sure if the bottle actually contained shampoo or conditioner or some other substance.  I also remember finding "raisin" juice in a Canadian grocery store and feeling disgusted until I realized that the other side said “grape juice”.  (Products in Canada are labeled on one side in English and on the other in French). 

In case you were wondering, after reading last week's blog, how likely it is that machines will soon replace human translators, we decided to share this lighthearted article demonstrating just how far MT technology still has to come before it could possibly replace humans in translation.  There are lots more examples in the article, but a few gems are below.

If someone told you that the translation and interpretation industry as we know it would be replaced by computers in less than twenty years, would you believe them? 

That's what author Ray Kurzweil believes.  Computers are getting "smarter" at a rapid rate, and he predicts that they will reach human levels of linguistic ability by 2029, making them formidable rivals to traditional translators.