Warning! Poorly Machine Translated Childrens´ Books etc

This is probably as much of a worry for Welsh as for any other minor language, see especially the second part of this post :

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The increasing ease of getting things “published” - or available to be published on demand does mean there is an awful lot of rubbish out there. Stuff which people would have had to pay to have had “vanity published” can now be available “on demand”, and have a chance of getting more than a few books sold. Markets for all books are available all over the world, anyone can easily try and get their books published.

This is different to how it was. Better in some ways, worse in others. Like information on the internet, it is becoming even more important that individuals themselves make the time and effort to distinguish between what they consider to be rubbish and worthwhile stuff.

I’ve certainly seen books available on Amazon in Welsh in this way - a lot of classics of literature, out of copyright, run through Google translate into every language under the sun. I’ve not seen any hard copies actually in real life, though, let alone been in danger of buying one by accident.

Thankfully, it seems there are enough decent publishing houses and decent published books in Wales for rubbish like this to be swamped.

The problem that does have an effect in Wales, through “Sgymraeg”, is the use of Google translate on signs. One just round the corner from me - “Chymanfa atolnodi” for “assembly point” of a hotel. It means nothing, except possibly “here is where we come together to punctuate”!

However, even official languages seem to have this problem (google translate based or not) - Latvian for instance -
“There are several contests held annually to promote correct use of Latvian.[6][7] Notably, the State Language Center holds contests for language mistakes, named “Gimalajiešu superlācis” after an infamous incorrect translation of Asiatic Black Bear. These mistakes, often quite amusing, are both grammatical and stylistic; sometimes also obvious typos and mistranslations are considered to belong here. Organizers claim that mistakes are largely collected in areas heavily populated by Russian-speakers, as well as from Lithuanian-owned chain stores. Mistranslations are not necessarily grammatical, but also stylistic and vocabulary mistakes, such as literal translations from the English language.”

It’s a good lesson to be learned. In this age, it is so easy to get hold of information about anything, and so easy to get books published “on demand”, we have to do our own research into what is good quality or bad quality, rather than assuming that someone else has done it for us.

Swings and roundabouts.

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Agree, Welsh is in a somewhat stronger postiion, but all the same people mechanically churning out ´attractive´ kids books in languages they themselves don´t understand calls for extreme caution from buyers. See my comment to the linked article. Also some of that author´s other posts on dud translation, the Irish/Gaelic equivalent to sgymraeg, the uses and abuses of machine translation etc. He is something of an expert practitioner in IT and minority languages, so he knows his stuff.

Oh yes, humans will take advantage of any loophole. And deserve to be condemned for it. And Amazon should not sell things being sold with false advertising, things that are not fit for the purpose they are sold for.

There’s a verb conjugation tool out there - Verbix.com, which seems to come high in the rankings whenever I look for things. It sticks automatic endings on all the verbs, even the irregular ones - although someone has inputted something real for bod I think. I don’t know if anyone has accidentally stumbled across Verbix.com. Cael gives some new ideas on conjugation. It does give warnings though.

For Cael it says this - Warning! The verb you entered does not exist in Verbix verb database. The conjugations may not be accurate.

It doesn’t have correct versions of the more obscure verbs like cael, but it does have intriquing verbs in the database like this:

http://www.verbix.com/webverbix/go.php?D1=29&T1=Seisnigo&H1=129

and this

http://www.verbix.com/webverbix/go.php?D1=29&H1=129&T1=adbelydru

I was almost caught out by this until I got a little suspicious, looked into it a bit further, and saw the same person seeling “translations” of the same classics in many languages, which clearly didn’t look right.

It’s a great shame in life that good things (and “print on demand” can be a very good thing - I’ve bought a couple of genuine books that way, not Welsh-related), can be ruined by a few bad guys. :frowning:

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Yes, I think it could often be a bit of a danger with translations of the “classics” from English (or those which normally have English translations easily available). There just aren’t many of those in Welsh (for obvious reasons), so anyone Google searching or looking through Amazon for such things in Welsh will likely come across these atrocities rather than the non-existent decent stuff.

Yes, I think that the benefits of “print on demand” stuff outweigh the disadvantages myself. We just have to realise and remember that the situation has changed.

I´r rhai â diddordeb mewn petha fel hynny, dyma i chi bost arall o´r un awdur :

¨Without going into too much technical detail, machine translation of the kind that Google does works best with the following ingredients:
– a massive (billions of words) aligned bilingual corpus
– translation between structurally similar languages or
– translation from a grammatically complex language into a less grammatically complex language but not the other way round
– translation of short, non-colloquial phrases and sentences but not complex, colloquial or literary structures¨


¨That would leave English > Gaelic and herein lies the tragedy of the English/Irish pairing on Google Translate. Whatever the intentions of the developers, people will mis-use such a system. I have put together a few annotated photos which illustrate the scale of the disaster in Ireland¨

http://www.akerbeltz.org/sealach/GTblunders.html

¨But sadly “Got Gaelic onto Google” probably just sounds sexier on your CV than “Banged some desks and made sure all kids in Gaelic Medium Education can now easily type àèìòù”…¨

I might actually put that up in my literacy classroom… :wink:

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“Chymanfa atolnodi” Agree, we certainly need to put a full stop to that kind of thing :open_mouth:

My mum’s work had a similar one - a typo in the English on the “fire assembly point” sign combined with an auto translator had lead the Welsh to read something along the lines of “Adeiladwch Tân Yma” which I’m pretty sure they didn’t really want people to do…

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