Don’t leave Google Translate alone with your idioms

By Plush Text · Leave a Comment

That sounds so ominous, doesn’t it? Don’t leave Google Translate alone with your [fill in the blank]. It’s a bit like saying don’t leave your 5-year-old alone with the neighbourhood bully or mom’s glue gun.

Well, excuse the sensationalism for a minute but you’ll soon see why we think it’s necessary.

An idiom is a phrase, a common saying, or a string of words, that gains its meaning from the combination of all of its words. Take away one of the words, and the phrase may suddenly lose its meaning. Because of their linguistically complex and colourful nature, idioms are almost never translated literally or word for word.

One of the real difficulties that automated translation systems (and not unsurprisingly, foreign-language speakers learning English) face is interpreting and understanding the real messages conveyed by certain language constructs. Idioms often lack context and it’s difficult for both computers and new language learners to understand what’s really being said.

In the case of online translation software, the computer-generated process takes one word in one language and replaces it with the corresponding word. However, the process of human-powered translation, or “transcreation” as it is becoming known, is vastly different and involves an exceptionally high level of language knowledge, language ability (both reading and writing), and creativity.

To test the limitations of online translation software, we gave Google Translate a few idioms and recorded the results. Here’s what we found:

Example 1: “Danser devant le buffet” is a French expression that means “to go without supper”. You are too busy working, and you worked right through supper. Google Translate, however, translates this as to “dance before the buffet”. That’s probably more in line with something that might happen at a wedding where family members might – how would you say it – overindulge.

Example 2: The expression “être le boute-en-train de la soirée”, the English equivalent of which is “to be the life of the party” is translated by Google as “be the life and soul of the night-train”. Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t know what that night-train is, and I certainly don’t know what it’s “life and soul” is.

Example 3: A “véritable conte de fées” is a colourful French expression that means a “rags-to-riches story”. However, Google Translate renders it as just simply “a fairtytale”. It’s not completely wrong, but the translation definitely loses some of its impact and character with the dull “fairtytale”.

It’s easy to see how an online translator might “misinterpret” the meaning of the saying because it doesn’t understand what the idiom really means. It just looks up a word, finds its equivalent, and substitutes one word for another. And we think that has about as much to do with translation as washing dishes with green soap does with corporate greenwashing.

Idioms are some of the hardest parts of any language to translate… luckily you can find the appropriate or accepted equivalents if you look hard enough. Try a Google search with the idiom in parentheses “like this” and add the language you want the equivalent in. It could be good way to get a translation of the idiom without resorting to Google Translate and risking a faux pas in another language.

Better luck next time, Google Translate!