High-Context Languages and Machine Translation

Raise you hand if you've ever used Google Translate.  Keep that hand up if you've ever scoffed or giggled at the results.

I imagine very few of us have lowered our hands.

That is not to say Google Translate (or any online translation tools, for that matter) is useless.  On the contrary, I find it extremely useful, as long as I don't expect it to do the translation work for me.  Compared to when it was first introduced, Google Translate definitely deserves a round of applause for having come such a long way.

As of now, machine translation cannot reliably translate any given sentence.  But for lower-context languages such as German, it does the job quite admirably already.  For higher-context languages, however, there's still a long way to go because simple substitution of words or phrases from another language usually ends up producing laughable results such as "salt and pepper cherries."

Allow me to back up a little bit and talk briefly about the concept of high-context and low-context languages.  This idea was introduced by American anthropologist Edward T. Hall in his 1976 book Beyond Culture.  Simply put, lower-context languages are more explicit and their meanings can be obtained more easily through words alone.  Higher-context languages, on the other hand, rely more on contextual understanding of cultures and relationships to "divine" the hidden meanings.

I did a quick search online and found a wonderful article offering a side-by-side comparison between low context and high context, with an excellent summary as follows:
Low context: Words say it all.
High context: The surrounding circumstances say it all.[1]

Earlier I used the word "divine" to describe how one gets the meaning in a high-context language.  I wasn't being sarcastic.  In fact, I was referring to the frustration commonly shared by pretty much all of us at one point or another, even in our native languages.

Take humor as an example.  To "get" a joke, one has to know the context first, even with one's own native language.  If you have to "explain" a joke to someone who isn't familiar with the back story of the punchline, at the end of the explanation the joke just isn't funny any more.  This is why animated movies such as "The Lego Movie" and "The Incredibles" are popular with parents as well as their children: some jokes that sound like innocent child's play contain hidden flavors appreciated by adults, thus making the films enjoyable to audiences of all age groups.  But of course if a dad tried to explain to his 5-year-old why one particular joke was funny, it could be mind-boggling, gross, or totally incomprehensible to the poor kid.

Machine translation of high-context languages right now is similar to explaining a joke to someone.  And until Google changes their algorithms on how a sentence gets parsed, translated, and then re-assembled into a sentence of a different language, linguistic professionals of high-context languages will never have to worry about losing work to Google Translate.  But don't get too cocky: machine translation is quickly catching up and it'd be foolish to think human translation can never be replaced on any front.

Oh, you can put that hand down now.  


Please translate responsibly.

Reference:
1. Robert Strauss, "Low and High Context Cultures", Global Perspectives Consulting (2012).