Man vs. Machine

In Spanish: "The hand washes itself, don't whiten don't fall, lovely iron" 
via WTF? Microservios

We've recently heard some providers say that they no longer send translations out professional translation services because online tools such as GoogleTranslate have become so effective.  We thought in the interest of scientific discovery, we'd put this theory to the test.

This great website puts your simple phrase through a series of machine translations, back and forth to English so that you can see the linguistic distortions.  For more giggles, the program will allow you to run something through 30 or even 50 translations.  In no short time the simplest text goes awry: "How many apples did you buy?" in just 10 machine translations becomes "How Apple Store?". 

This is fun enough, but let's really illustrate the importance of a human interpreter and/or translator.  What happens when we do some medical and legal texts?  Even the simple "Take one pill in the morning and one in the evening" becomes "Morning and evening sleeping pills."  Very different!  The classic "You have the right to remain silent.  Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law." becomes "You have the right to remain silent. You can say that in court." in just 10 iterations. 

All this is very relevant given that recently a murder case in Ohio was thrown out due to a human interpreter's error in interpreting the Miranda warning.  If humans can get it wrong sometimes, and we have yet to build a computer that can even come close to what the human brain does, imagine the danger in using machine translation for anything beyond the simplest of phrases. 

Our review: machine translations are useful in a pinch, and perhaps good for basic phrases (what time is the bus?), should never be used when someone's life or liberty is on the line.  For that, the old-fashioned human being is probably still your most reliable option.