GOOGLE AS A TRANSLATOR
Polad POLADOV
Qafqaz and WesternUniversities
ppoladov@qu.edu.az
Baki/AZERBAIJAN
We all know that Google the giant, search engine has not just tried itself in searching industry but books, voice search
and so on. But in this thesis I would like to touch upon google as a translator. There are dozens of online translators on the
net. They not only are useful to translate word but sentences as well, depending on the language. Google also decided to
take part in this competition in the translation industry if just it can be called. This is the fact that Google couldn’t become
successful in this sphere, and “very famous” for its wrong translations misinterpretations which most of the time lead to
general misconceptions in the language. Even in some countries there are victims of google translator. For example in
Turkey there is Restaurant called “Çay ocağı” in Turkish together with English version “Tea January”. Then another
example “Dönər evi”translated like “Rounding House”.Businessmen trusting google as search engine also trusted it as
translator so they decided to get it translated via google translator and stick it on the restaurant or some other facilities they
own.
Google is good when translating into English when target language is English and the language being translated from is
one from EU member countries, such as Italy, Ireland, Poland, Germany, Sweden and so forth. Google translator is good at
translating words even short sentences from these countries into English language as it has well been programmed in the
listed languages. Now time to view Google translate, first of all I would like to pinpoint that Google translate is free
multilingual statistical machine translation service provided by Google Inc. to translate written text from one language into
another. Statistical machine translation was first introduced by Warren Weaver in 1949, later was introduced in 1993.This
statistical machine translation is based upon translations which are generated upon statistical models and it contrasts with
machine translation and example-based machine translation. Statistical machine translators use the words which are often
used so then translate Ocak as January but not center. Because in Turkish language Ocak in most cases used as a month,
first month of calendar, so google automatically detects its usage in most circumstances and accepts it as the right choice. I
think this is what made google translate fail. Because if one word is used in most places doesn’t mean that it is correct
translation. Besides, being statistical machine translator it ignores most grammar rules. I think Google now doesn’t
approach the issue seriously because company itself knows that the field itself is vague and wide and difficult. But it is
possible that the company will tackle the problem in no time even making programs able to translate not only written way
but oral as well.
But my advice for translator students studying, amateur and pro translators is that they should be more careful when
getting their translations done. Google has the brand name so sometimes it is misunderstood, rational person using it relies
on it and even using it while learning the languages which can later cause catastrophic results giving wrong translations
person will learn wrong words and will use it in wrong places. So you are doing search or surfing, Google is the N1 you
want to translate just keep distance
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