With all the machine translation out there, why is so much effort put into translating Bibles?  Why can’t people just use Google translate?

I obviously find some value in machine translation as you can see the sidebar icon for doing machine translations of this blog.  But, if you have used Google Translate or other machine translation tools much, you probably know already that accuracy and readability aren’t quite what they are designed for, and not every language in the world is available on these types of translation tools.

My friend Eddie has done a great post about this very topic:

by Eddie Arthur, on July 29th, 2010

This fascinating (and potentially useful) headline comes from an Indonesian newspaper after Google Translate had finished with it. There were a number of fascinating other things to read, including:

• Train Miniature Rooms
• Success Plastiki Skip the Pacific Ocean
• Salad Dressing Women Arrested Police
• Japanese PM Leadership Doubtful Wife
• Elvis Autopsy Equipment Sale
• The car is moving faster than a bullet
• Car Ice Cream For Dogs

I’m sure that all of these articles made perfect sense in the original and it is possible to work out what some of them mean even in the translation. However, this shows how difficult machine translation really is. None of these headlines comes across as natural English and all of them are difficult to understand. We are not about to see machine translations of the Bible into minority languages any time soon, whatever the pundits say.

Go to Eddie’s blog: www.kouya.net

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