Honest Compositions in a Babel-fish Generation

Today as educators we have no illusions about the easy availability of translation engines, and we should not be so naïve as to think that students won’t use them simply because we ask them not to. Let’s face it: they are readily accessible, they cost nothing, and they provide nearly instantaneous results. They have come a long way from anything you or I are likely to have played with in the 1980s or 1990s. Today they display surprising sensitivity to idiom and cultural nuance. But how accurate are they? Visit any of their internet homepages and you would think they were linguistically allpowerful. Most homepages bill their product as “free translation.” You type or paste your text in one window, press a button, and within seconds the translation appears in the other window. If you look closely at the fine print, though, you will find that even the manufacturer warns against heavy reliance on the engine as a translation tool. In fact, most use the free translation tool as a lure to upsell homepage visitors to the much more expensive human translation services. It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book. The homepage of one translation portal contains a long list of “translation tips” to keep in mind as you use the free translation engine. Of course, this begs the question, why should I need translating tips at all, if the engine is so cleverly doing the translating for me? The tips include some sensible advice about correct punctuation, and also some rather nebulous suggestions about keeping sentences simple, using words that have only one meaning, and – my favorite – avoiding idiomatic expressions. In other words, to get maximum benefit from the product you must first relieve the translation engine of all of the core translation tasks. There is a culture of consumerism evidenced in these products as well. Perhaps the most well-known homepage is called Babel Fish. Do we even remember what a Babel Fish is? The Babel Fish is a piece of cultural history in itself that had its birth in the mind of science fiction author Douglas Adams, and appeared in the popular novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which was later serialized for television in Great Britain. A page at BBC online defines the Babel Fish thus: