Translation: A Hard Task for Software

With business picking up overseas, U.S. corporations are spending more money to have product brochures, technical documents and business letters translated into foreign languages.

But with professional translators charging up to $70 per page, having a lengthy business document translated can be expensive, especially for a small firm trying to crack a foreign market. So some executives have looked for a high-tech solution.

For years, computer software companies have tried to develop programs that can automatically translate documents into foreign languages. But users complain that even the best of these programs offer only minimal translation accuracy.

“For certain subjects, such as technical manuals that do not have much flowery language or idiomatic expressions, our software can sometimes reach up to 80% translation accuracy,” said Ernest Marcos of MS Language and Technology, a Miami-based company specializing in computer-aided foreign language translation service. But he conceded that, for most uses, the software is only about 20% accurate.

MS Language is one of a handful of companies that make software for language translation. MicroTac Software of San Diego markets a program called Language Assistant Series. And La Jolla-based Systran Translation Systems Inc. has developed a program that has been used by such customers as Xerox Corp., Eastman Kodak Co., General Dynamics and Martin Marietta.

The translation goofs made by computer programs can sometimes be humorous--if not the type one would like to make in a business letter.

Marcos recalls using one program from a now-defunct Chicago firm to translate a Spanish-language magazine article about pop singer Gloria Estefan’s concert at New York’s Yankee Stadium. The original article in Spanish described the singer as seductively taking off her jacket and “teasing” the 20,000 “fans.” The English version, translated by the software, had Estefan “molesting” 20,000 “ceiling fans.”

The World Trade Center Associations of Orange County and Long Beach this month began testing a computerized translation service supplied by Computran Systems Inc., a Beaverton, Ore., software company. The program translates from English to Japanese or Spanish, and vice versa.

According to executives at Berlitz International, the New York-based language school operator, software developers have yet to come up with a program that can translate a document the first time with better than 40% to 50% accuracy.

“We are decades away from coming up with a computer system that can give 100% accuracy in translating,” said Alex Marquez of Cypress-based Iberia Language Services Inc.

“You can never take the human being out of a translation loop. Some people argue that machine translation will be impossible because translation involves knowledge of the arts, history and everything else. It’s not all science.”