I’m not going to look for perfection, but instead focus on the overall grammar and see if Google Translate was able to comprehend the sentence. If you are reasonably fluent in Japanese feel free to read through the Japanese text above and you’ll realize soon where this post is going.įor the rest of us, let’s start by breaking down the first sentence into a few phrases and see how they match up with the original English text. Now for the Japanese text returned by Google Translate: If you think about all the things involved in this process, and how closely it is linked with who we are, it’s pretty amazing. Of all of the activities we do on a daily basis, I feel that the act of communicating with another person using spoken language and a series of back and forth exchanges, what we call “conversation”, holds a very unique place. I’ve picked a single paragraph of my recent essay on conversation in a foreign language, as it is a somewhat complex passage that was written naturally, without any bias of writing it for the purposes of a translation experiment. I’m curious about both directions of translation (English->Japanese and Japanese->English), and although choosing my native English as the target language would be easier to evaluate, for this post I’ve decided to just focus on English->Japanese this time. Nowadays we have things like Google Translate, a free service that translates between over 50 world languages, including Japanese.Īs someone who has spend a great deal of time learning Japanese, part of me gets a bit scared at the prospect of a machine translator that is even remotely close to that of a human. Back when I first started studying Japanese, I wasn’t aware of any translation programs that worked between English and Japanese, and if there was I’m pretty sure they were very expensive and not very commonly used.
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