Look Who’s Translating. Impersonations, Chinese Whispers and Fun with Machine Translation on the Internet

Look Who’s Translating: Impersonations, Chinese Whispers and Fun with Machine Translation on the Internet Federico Gaspari School of Informatics University of Manchester PO Box 88 Manchester M60 1QD United Kingdom F.Gaspari@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk Abstract. This paper presents an overview of websites that parody real online machine translation (MT) services, as their sole purpose is to amuse users by offering fun translations without any practical use beyond their entertainment value. The websites considered here are designed to accept input in standard English, and can be broadly grouped into two main categories: the “impersonation” websites translate into sociolects strongly associated with certain groups of speakers, local dialects or non-standard accents, invented languages like Pig Latin or the alleged speaking style of eccentric celebrities and funny fictional characters; the “Chinese whispers” websites, on the other hand, translate the input from English into one or more target language(s), and then back again into English, with each stage of the process increasing the distortion in both form and meaning between the final resulting output and the original source text. The paper looks at some of the key linguistic and design issues behind the implementation of these fun translation websites, and concludes discussing their impact on the reputation of Internet-based MT tools, considering how they might affect users’ trust in real online MT services. 1. Introduction and background Machine translation (MT) is a serious business with a wide range of useful real-life practical applications. It is, however, quite common for MT to unintentionally become the source of hilarity, particularly when “howlers” produced by MT systems are publicised, often as a result of carefully concocted experiments or tests designed to push the reasonable capabilities of translation technology to the limit and expose some inevitable weaknesses. Some of the most commonly cited examples of such howlers have become classics in spite of being apocryphal (Hutchins, 1995). However, others are certainly genuine and are reported on a fairly regular basis in newspapers, magazines, articles on the Internet, postings of discussion forums, etc. Ironically, this way of having fun with (or making fun of) machine translation echoes the humorous results of human translations (whether written or oral) of dubious quality that give rise to target-language texts taking on unintended meanings, becoming nonsensical or having ambiguous readings, as can happen when translators and interpreters work into a language with which they are not thoroughly familiar. This paper provides an overview of websites that capitalise on the potential of machine translation and MT-like applications to amuse by offering an end product without any real use beyond its entertainment value. After the introduction, which provides a background to this topic, sections 2 and 3 present a description of the two major categories of these fun translation websites with a list of salient examples, outlining some of the main linguistic and design issues behind their implementation. Finally, section 4 provides a conclusion with some considerations on the impact of these amusing websites on the reputation and trustworthiness of real web-based MT systems that showcase and promote …

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