Why Human Translation Will Always Have Its Place

The other day, someone who shall remain nameless was looking up a famous chess player on Google to verify his suspicion that this player wears a toupee.

Lo and behold, most of the search results were people commenting on said chess player and his "wig."

Our nameless protagonist said to me, "Don't people use the word 'toupee' any more?"  I thought about it for a second and replied, "Maybe they use the word 'wig' because most chess players in the world are not native English speakers."

That seems like a logical explanation.  Take Chinese as an example.  "Toupee" and "wig" are both translated as 假髮, which literally means "fake hair."  I'm sure a lot of languages don't distinguish between toupee and wig like English does.  Therefore when those speakers try to use English (which is pretty much the common language on most of the international forums and message boards among chess players) to talk about this chess player and his "toupee," the word "wig" was inadvertently used.

That makes me marvel at the thought that went behind Google Search.  Obviously somebody had thought of situations like this and decided that the search hits should include "wig" as well, even when it is not part of the search keywords.

However, machines can only do so much.  There are instances that require a human brain to decipher phrases that are intentionally fraught with typos and sound-alikes.  

Examples abound in Chinese.  杯具, for instance, means a set of drinkware.  Somehow, somebody decided to use it as a cute replacement for 悲劇, which actually means tragedy, since the two phrases share the same pronunciation.  So far, it's used as slang only.  But I've seen websites' 404 (error) pages using 杯具 to describe how much the webmaster regrets such a tragedy.  

Another popular phrase these days is 內牛滿面, which actually means absolutely nothing at all.  (Its literal translation would be something like "the inside cow all over one's face.")  In fact, I doubt that it has been acknowledged by any Chinese dictionaries yet.  However, it's prevalently used online as a colloquial form of 淚流滿面, which means "tears streaming down one's face."  The former was probably an accidental typo that somehow gained a lot of traction because, again, someone thought it was cute to see totally irrelevant homophones in phrases we use all the time.

This is all fine for native Chinese speakers, of course.  Most of them will be able to understand these with no trouble, because once the phrases are sounded out they're easy to decipher.  But machines and non-native speakers are completely out of luck, especially since you can't look these phrases up in a dictionary.  

That's why I think human translation will always have its place.  We have to clean up our own mess, after all.  


Please translate responsibly.