English for Wizards

Terrible translators, suspicious spellers

By John Moore

AltaVista の翻訳サイト BabelFish

Last week, talking about typing, I said it's ridiculous that computers can't simply hear and understand what people say. Well, this week I have another complaint: Why can't computers learn English?!

There are some online translation services, like AltaVista's Babel Fish, and they can sometimes provide decent translations, but sometimes, it's totally wrong. When you enter 魔法使い, for example, Babel Fish translates it as "magical using" or sometimes even "magical errand."

Go ahead and try it for yourself (http://babelfish.altavista.com). Enter some text you want to translate in the big, white blank. Maybe you can just copy and paste from another document. Be sure to choose the right language combination, such as "English to Japanese" or "Japanese to English." Then press the Translate button. You'll find that the translation is OK perhaps two-thirds of the time, but there are still far too many wrong translations. Some day, computer translation will achieve 99-percent accuracy, but until then, keep studying your English!

Even though the computer can't do everything for you, at least it can help. For one thing, it can be pretty useful as a spell-checker. Many people already have some version of Microsoft Word, the most popular word-processing package. While you type, it will put a red, squiggly line under words it thinks are misspelled.

Like just now. I accidentally typed "squggly" instead of squiggly. A right-click on "squggly," brings up various other spellings, such as squiggly, snugly and smugly. You can see the correct spelling is the top choice.

But you still have to be careful about computer spell-checking. Once, using an old English version of Word, I correctly typed "Kanagawa," but the American software wanted to change that into "Kansas." In addition, the spell-checker won't help you with homonyms, like when you write, "It's two bad," instead of, "It's too bad." People's names are especially tricky. I heard a spell-checking program once changed a man's name, Myron, into "moron." That's a real disaster.

So definitely use the spell- checker on your word-processor, but don't assume the computer is smarter than you. Always think carefully before taking the machine's suggestion. Doesn't it make you feel good knowing that people, not computers, are still the smartest?

Shukan ST: May 23, 2003

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