Hello Class,

To translate the two paragraphs I used Google translate and Reverso, I noticed that both had similar translations, although Reverso gives the user more options to conjugate verbs. However, both of the translation websites made big mistakes. For instance in Reverso “esposa” meaning wife was translated as “handcuffs”, in Google the term “hechos desgraciados” was translated as “echo unfortunate”. Therefore, with these simple examples I noticed that computers can’t replace human translators. But they are a great help to get you started, because they translate most of the words and then is a matter of proof reading and changing several things around. Also, with Automatic translation is faster to get the translation of a word and then is a matter or researching the meaning. The disadvantage is that they are not precise and at times can be risky if the translation is on a language one does not know very well. David Bellos mentions in his book Is That a Fish on your Ear? that, “Computer-aided human translation and human-aided computer translation are both substantial achievements, and without them the global flows of trade and information of the past few decades would not have been nearly so smooth”. He says Google translate is clever, but he recommends to only use it in languages that one knows very well, since it can come up with sentences that don’t make sense at all and only a person who truly knows the language can detect. In addition, he says that we would have to adjust the computer to discover the meaning of a sentence from its original form and to do that the computer would have to know all the grammatical rules of that particular language but nobody knows all the grammatical rules since there are many irregularities and we use them quite often. Even if computers knew all the grammatical rules , still they are not able to understand the context of a sentence.

Furthermore, translation has been the gate of global communication, which in my opinion is key to understanding the circumstances that other countries can face in their nations, this is why accurate translation is very important. In their book Found in Translation, Nataly Kelly and Jost Zetzsche use twitter as an example for global communication. Twitter is a multinational company and its main goal is to reach out to all people around the glove. For this very reason they have made it possible for twitter to be translated in several languages. With more languages available, Facebook, twitter, and Wikipedia can increase their users substantially and also their users can communicate with people from other parts of the world. These companies use computer technology to translate but they also have translators proofread and make sure the translations are accurate. After reading both chapters, I noticed that translation is more then what we think, alphabets around the world are different so computer keyboards must be adjusted, languages are hard to learn so translators can help millions of people communicate in different languages, but above all automatic translation technologies depend on humans.