Humanity’s most salient tool: technology. It has turn our world smaller & more connected, especially since the invasion of the World web. But despise our progress in technology, the vast amount of different languages stills imposes a barrier in communication. Nataly Kelly, & Jost Zezsche in their book “Found in Translation”, states that “Language is the key that unlocks the door to basic human rights” (Kelly, Zezsche, P. 17).  The essence of their argument is that being social creature by nature, if an individual don’t know how to communicate with others or if rights and information needed is not in their familiar language, then human rights can’t be claimed. This is one of the reasons to why there is a strong need for a perfect translation machine. In modern times we have sophisticated applications that can translate, google translator being the most popular, but David Bellos in his book “is that a fish in your ear” explains that “human translators…produce characteristically fluent and meaningful output, and you really can’t tell if they are wrong unless you also understand the source—in which case you don’t need the translation at all.”(Bellos, P.256). Basically, because a professional interpreter masters the languages they interpret, they can translate accurately, as opposite to a translating machine like google translator, as they depend from a large data base of translated material, to try to translate the desire material.

For instance, from the exercises given to us by our professor, neither of the article translated 100 % correctly. I will be share my analysis of the first article, “Portland won’t remove graffiti depicting LePage in Ku Klux Klan robe” by peter McGuire. For starters, the headline, it didn’t translate the word “graffiti”, instead left it in English, when in Spanish it’s spelled as“grafiti”. Furthermore, the headline also translated “wont remove” as “no eliminara”. That is incorrect, because “no eliminara” translate as won’t eliminate. Although the meaning is almost the same, it isn’t really an accurate translation & almost seems as nothing more than pure coincidence. Additionally, the word “picture” was translated into “imagen”, when the word “imagen” really means image. It is a synonym, but it isn’t the exact word translation. In the context, there are other minor translation issues, but the biggest issue of them all is the translation of “It’s part of a larger piece covering the entire 100-foot-long wall”. It was translated as “Es parte de un pedazo más grande que cubre toda la pared de 100 pies de largo”. This is a phrase use in museums and in art gallery, directly translating it would then change the meaning of the phrase. In my opinion, the correct translation to this phrase is “Es parte de una obra más grande cubriendo la pared entera que es 100 pies de largo”. This analysis goes to prove that bellos is correct about human translators, in contrast to translating machines. A person knows how to interpret familiar languages, and is able to catch on to minor mistakes that makes a world of difference. Although, google translator’s mistake where minor in this case, that is not always the case. When translating context it needs to be precise, if not, then the consequences can be excruciating.