Another Case of Lost In Translation

Last January I wrote about a translation gaffe I made during a trip to the Czech Repulic ("Healthy Train Stations"). Here's another one ...

In June of 1995 I was assigned to travel around the Czech Republic with the leaders of a large group of U.S. soldiers who acted as honor guards in cities and towns all across that country to help celebrate the 50th anniversary of their liberation from the Nazis. It was a great experience which I will cherish forever.

Towards the end of the trip, we ended up in the Eastern Bohemian city of Strakonice. It was a great place with friendly people and a large western style hotel, the Hotel Bavor. One morning, I had a small item which I wished to bring up with the front desk staff. Here's the conversation as it would have occurred totally in English:

Me: Excuse me, sir. There is a large spider building a home above the door outside my room.

Clerk: I beg your pardon? Please! There are no bats in the hotel.

Me: Yes, there are. One is building a web above the door outside my room. It's a large spider, as the web shows.

Clerk: I don't mean to disagree with you, but there are no bats in this hotel - none at all. We are regularly inspected for such things. Besides, bats don't build webs

Me: I'm sorry to argue, but there really is a large spider building a net above the door outside my room. I don't think it should be such cause for concern. Spiders are bound to get into the hotel. All you need do is kill it with a broom.

Clerk (rolling his eyes and looking at the bell hop): Why don't you go up with this gentleman and see this bat. I'm sure he's mistaken but we should make sure.

So, the bell hop and I get into the elevator and go up to my room. When we get there, I point to the large spider web above the door.

Me: See, there's the spider web.

Bell Hop: That's not a bat, that's a spider! It's a spider web, not a bat web.

Me (seeing the error I had made): Oh - spider! Not bat. I'm terribly sorry. Please excuse my misuse of the proper word in Czech.

For the rest of my stay in the hotel, I was known as "Mr. Bat." I prefer to think I was Bat Man.

Healthy Train Stations?

I recently blogged about Google's Language Tools and how they approach the issues of translation. At the end of that piece, I mentioned I might post something about my translation gaffes. Here's a particularly memorable one:

In one of my previous lives I was a Czech linguist in the Army. In December of 1993 I was stationed in Darmstadt, Germany working for as an "Orderly Room NCO." It was rather like being an administrative assistant for the commander. One of my duties was to answer the phone. Answering one fateful call allowed me to go on a great trip.

The Call

This particular call was from a captain who was the commander of a chemical unit located in Vilseck, Germany. He told me he and four of his fellow soldiers had been chosen to make the first unit to unit contact visit with the 1st Chemical Defense Brigade of the Czech Army. They were getting ready to travel to Liberec in the Czech Republic to meet with officers there and discuss joint training exercises in Germany and the Czech Republic. Seeing that the Iron Curtain had fallen just a few years before, this was quite an historic event and the first of its kind between the U.S. and Czech Armies.

Not knowing anything about anything Czech, he asked if there might be someone in our unit who 

could go to Vilseck before their trip and talk to them about the people, culture and military courtesies "over there." He also mentioned they might like someone to travel with them on their visit in order to assist them during times when the official interpreter was busy and to help them make sure things went smoothly.

Might be someone? Of course there was - me! I tried not to show too much excitement, but this was a great opportunity to visit the country I had studied about and whose language I practiced for years. It was also a chance to be a small part of history, this being the first such military contact between the two Armies which until recently had been on opposite sides of the Cold War.

In the end, they invited me to come with them to the Czech Republic, and I very happily went along.

Getting Ready

Up to this point, I had studied and practiced the Czech language for nearly ten years. But, I had never traveled to the Czech Republic and I had never worked as a "live" interpreter. I knew I needed some advice on how to handle the situation. Fortunately, I had a good friend who worked as an interpreter and happened to live nearby. He had 3 pieces of advice for me:

1. Carry a reporter's notebook and write down new words and phrases. This was the most useful thing he told me. I ended up using quite a few pages in the notebook he gave me.
2. Tell the people to look at the person with whom they're speaking instead of at me. This made a lot of sense. Much face-to-face communication is non-verbal, so it pays to watch the person with whom one is speaking.
3. If someone tells a joke, lean over and say to the other person in his/her language something to the effect of: "This person just told a joke which is very funny in his/her language, but makes no sense in yours. Please smile and pretend to laugh."
   
   It is interesting, though, many military-themed jokes which are funny to soldiers in one language are also funny in other languages. Army life is very similar no matter to which army one belongs, so many of the jokes are very similar. I didn't have to use this advice as often as I might have in another situation.

What he did not tell me was how to handle things when you completely botch a translation. That I had to learn on my own.

The Trip

We took the train to Prague and were picked up by our hosts. They whisked us into an awaiting van and told us we were to stop on the way out of the city at the Czech Ministry of Defense offices to meet with the general in charge of all chemical defense troops.

We arrived at the Ministry of Defense building and were escorted to a meeting room which was set up for lunch. At first, we sat and ate and chatted about this and that. Towards the end of the meal, the general stood up and made a toast, wishing for a great era of cooperation.

There was a Czech lady assigned to the group who acted as the official translator. She was employed by the Ministry of Defense to translate manuals for Czech-made military equipment into English. Her English was impeccable and her interpretation abilities were excellent (despite the fact that she didn't think so). As we ate, she did most of the translating, while I jumped in from time to time as conversations moved around the table and to give her a chance to eat. She translated the General's speech quite nicely.

The Trip-Up
Then it was time for our group's leader to make a toast. I don't remember his exact words, though at the time I concentrated on them quite closely. He said something like: "I'm from a small town in the United States and I never thought I'd get to visit other countries to make new friends. I'm usually a man of few words, so please allow me to simply thank the soldiers of the Army of the Czech Republic for inviting us here to meet and to start an era of mutual cooperation and education. We are all very happy to be here and know our countries will enjoy mutual friendship for many, many years. Cheers."

It was that last word which tripped me up. You see, the phrase I intended to translate as "cheers" in Czech is "Na Zdravi" (NAH ZDRA-vi) or "to your health." This short phrase is very similar to the word "nádraží" (NAH-dra-zhee) which means "train station." You can guess which one I said.

One of the Czech officers sitting across from me when I said this caught on very quickly. He almost blew beer through his nose as he choked and pretended to cough an a vain attempt not to laugh. His eyes tripled in size, and as I looked over at him I knew what I had done. I looked across the table and asked him in Czech, "I said, 'train station' didn't I?" He nodded and pretended to cough again to hide his chortling.

At that moment I was mortified. Here we were, visiting ambassadors of the United States Army meeting with Generals and Colonels of the Czech Army hoping to successfully kick off an era of friendship and cooperation and I blew it right at the outset. I didn't even notice if anyone else caught my mistake.

Of course, it was really quite funny. For the rest of  our visit, any time there was a toast to be made, that officer and I would raise our glasses and quietly say "train station."

Google's Approach To Language Translation

Machine Translations Have Been Pretty Iffy

In a former life I worked as a translator and an interpreter. That experience has made me quite skeptical of machine translated text. In the past, translations I've seen from some software packages have ranged from "OK" to outright terrible. In the past when someone needed translations done and were contemplating purchasing software to do the work, I always strongly advised against machine translations in favor of human ones.  The cost may have been higher, but it was certainly offset by the quality of the work.

To be sure, human translations are not always perfect. There are subtle nuances which can be overlooked when going from one language to another. If the translator is not familiar with technical jargon, mistakes are also quite possible. During my time as a linguist I embarrassed myself on more than one occasion by completely botching a phrase. But, on the whole, humans tend to pick up on things and refer to dictionaries where software could not, no matter how well the package was written.

I think the biggest failing of those software packages, though, was the lack of memory and processing power available. Even today's powerful home computers are not powerful enough to run the serious computations required for the abstract programming a good translation package requires.

Google Has The Tools To Pull Off Better Translations

This is where the folks at Google can shine in this area. A recent posting in the Google Research Blog by Shankar Kumar and Wolfgang Macherey touches upon this very subject. Google has a good approach to language translation. First, they look at translation as a search problem. This makes a lot of sense because much of the same thought process and algorithms which goes into selecting relevant web sites based on key words goes into selecting the appropriate words and phrases when moving from one language to another. Second, Google has the processing power to run very complex calculations. They have the power to run routines which would be impossible for an individual PC to handle.

Basically, the Google method pulls a large number of possible translations for a given phrase and narrows them down to the "safest" one which will cause the "least amount of damage. " There is a link on the blog post which leads to the details of their method. I won't even pretend to understand most of the calculations, but the basic methodology appears to be similar to the way a person might work though a translation - especially if there is time to mull over and check things over once or twice. I think this makes their translations far superior than  those previously possible by machines.

Google's Method Seems To Work Well

I have used Google's Language Tools to help me quickly go through articles in German and Czech (2 languages I at least used to know very well). From what I can see, their methodology works quite nicely. I've at least come to trust them enough to translate items from English to French for our Intranet when the items are shown in our Montreal, Canada location. I'm no Francophile, but from what I can tell at least the basic points are made in the translation.

I love the way Kumar and Macherey describe getting the best translation as doing "the least amount of damage." As I mentioned above, I've caused little bit of damage, mostly to my own ego, with some of my translation faux pas. Perhaps I'll regale a story or two on another day.