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Machine
translation: A long-held dream
by
Frank N. Trinh
Xin
bấm vàođây để đọc bản tiếngViệt
While
surfing the talawas website recently, I had a chance to read
an article, titled “Translation: A profession for the
young?“, which was carried on-line in the newspaper “The
Expatriate”, issued on 22nd July, 2005. The article focussed
on foreign literary translation into the mother tongue, which
is Vietnamese. The writer revealed that translation may be
regarded as a profession, or not quite, depending on whether
it is considered from a professional or social perspective. It
is a profession because “it requires a period of time to
learn the trade, to work at it and to earn income”. It is
not quite a profession because, “it is not really like any
normal profession” but it possesses something “mysterious
and remote” and seems to belong in the realm of the aged, in
other words, it is beyond the reach of the young.
The person who put this article together wished to widely
canvas public opinion, so he had consulted six famous
Vietnamese translators currently residing in Ho Chi Minh City,
who, as illustrated by their photographs in the newspaper,
were all males and well into their sixties. Generally
speaking, the advice of all these people to any youngster
wishing to enter the profession is that they should:
-
Be
passionate about translation as if it were their favourite
hobby.
-
Be
fascinated by Vietnamese literature and their mother
tongue.
-
Be
keen to research and to learn in order to gain experience.
-
Be
able to visualise the situation in the source language to
transform it accurately and naturally into the target
language.
Translation
here is only understood as translating foreign literary works
into Vietnamese. Nothing is mentioned about the problem, if
any, of asking for the copy right of the author who owns the
intellectual property chosen for translation. Translator Pham
Viem Phuong, in particular, let it be known that the monthly
income before tax of a translator is in the neighbourhood of 4
million Vietnamese dong (the equivalent of much less than
A$400). However, he did not mention how many hours were worked
per month by the professional translator.
From my personal experience in Australia, translation, or
rather interpreting and translating community information, to
me, is a part of the “bread and butter” of my profession.
In regard to translating literary works, it is a hobby
depending on my inspiration, but not for remuneration. Most of
my translation work of this nature is translating into
English, which includes short stories by Nhat Tien, Nguyen Huy
Thiep, Pham Thi Hoai, etc… Hopefully, there will come a day
when I will put them into a collection of translated short
stories for publication, but not for any commercial interest,
because the labour and printing costs involved outweigh the
income gained.
My dream is to use the machine to help in my translations.
Therefore, for this reason, about three or four years ago
while participating in an international forum run by overseas
Vietnamese, I was introduced by a female academic in IT in
California , USA, to Systran machine translation. As a test, I
cut and pasted a paragraph of approximately 150 words from one
of my articles written in English, and ticked the box to
translate it into French. Within one second I obtained the
paragraph translated into French. What a feeling!
Below is an example:
Original
text:
No
Pain, No Gain I don't remember exactly how many times I've
visited the Netherlands. I vaguely recollect that it would be
at least five times. Three times out of England, once out of
the USA and this last time, out of Australia. These visits
cover a period of over 20 years. Each time I went it was to
visit friends whom I sorely missed. Visiting people is my main
priority, whilst sight-seeing takes second place. This way of
travelling costs us less, but gains us more, much like in the
early days of being Vietnamese refugees. However, this last
time, on my arrival in Amsterdam, apart from seeing friends
and sight-seeing, I also had to do something which was for me
far more advantageous - that is to attend to my teeth. This
trip was about a patient seeking a dental doctor, and looking
for a private clinic for a period of two weeks, free of
charge. (159 words)
Systran’s
Translated
text (Alta Vista Babel Fish):
Aucune
douleur, aucun gain je ne me rappelle pas exactement combien
de fois j'ai visité les
Pays Bas.
Je rappelle vaguement qu'il serait au moins cinq temps. Trois
fois hors de l'Angleterre, une fois hors des Etats-Unis et de
cette dernière fois, hors de l'Australie. Ces visites
couvrent une période de sur 20 ans. Chaque fois que je
suis allé elle devait rendre visite
aux amis dont je me suis douloureusement ennuyés. Les
personnes visitantes sont ma priorité principale, tout en la
visite touristique prend le deuxième endroit. Cette manière
du déplacement nous coûte moins, mais nous gagne davantage,
tout comme en les jours tôt d'être les réfugiés
vietnamiens. Cependant, cette dernière fois, sur mon arrivée
à Amsterdam, indépendamment de voir des amis et de la visite
touristique, j'ai dû également faire quelque chose qui était
pour moi bien plus avantageux qu'est s'occuper mes dents. Ce
voyage était au sujet d'un patient cherchant un docteur
dentaire, et recherchant une clinique privée pendant une période
de deux semaines, gratuitement. (168 words)
Recently I
tried the same English passage with Google machine translation
and I obtained the following:
Google’s
Translated text:
Aucune
douleur, aucun gain je ne me rappelle pas exactement combien
de fois j'ai visité les
Hollandes.
Je rappelle vaguement qu'il serait au moins cinq temps.
Trois fois hors de l'Angleterre, une fois hors des
Etats-Unis et de cette dernière fois, hors de l'Australie.
Ces visites couvrent une période de sur 20 ans.
Chaque fois que cela
j'a disparu il devait rendre visite
aux amis dont je me suis douloureusement ennuyés.
Les personnes visitantes sont ma priorité principale,
tout en la visite touristique prend le deuxième endroit.
Cette manière du déplacement nous coûte moins, mais
nous gagne davantage, tout comme en les jours tôt d'être les
réfugiés vietnamiens. Cependant,
cette dernière fois, sur mon arrivée à Amsterdam, indépendamment
de voir des amis et de la visite touristique, j'ai dû également
faire quelque chose qui était à moi bien plus avantageux
qu'est s'occuper mes dents.
Ce voyage était au sujet d'un patient cherchant un
docteur dentaire, et recherchant une clinique privée pendant
une période de deux semaines, gratuitement. (167 words)
More recently I also relied on Systran
and Google to translate an introductory paragraph of mine
written in English, on the occasion of The Year of the
Rooster, as follows:
Original text:
A
Vietnamese Lunar New Year Message
Dear Everyone,
Well, the Year of the Monkey is over and once again
it’s time to reminisce about the lives of the family, as we
head into the Year of the Rooster… Let us hope that the Year
of the Rooster heralds in a brighter future for all of us.
Roosters will not try ‘to compete with each other by their
louder crow’, as Vietnamese people often say, in order to
avoid last year’s world turmoil of the Iraqi War. Also, in
the light of the tsunami disaster, let us all look at the
bigger picture and see 2005 as a year of understanding and
consideration for our fellow man. If the worst comes to the
worst, we might like to call 2005 the Year of the Hen, because
hens don’t crow or fight their hearts out. (143 words)
Then I was given this passage in French:
Systran’s Translated text (Alta
Vista Babel Fish)
Un
message lunaire vietnamien de nouvelle année cher chacun,
bien, l'année du singe plus d'et de nouveau il est temps de
se rappeler au sujet des vies de la famille, car nous nous
dirigeons dans l'année du coq... Espérons que l'année
des hérauts de coq dans un futur plus lumineux
pour tous les nous. Les coqs n'essayeront pas le `pour
concurrencer l'un l'autre par leur corneille
vietnamienne plus forte
', comme
les gens disent souvent,
afin d'éviter l'agitation du monde de
l'année dernière de la guerre irakienne.
En outre, à la lumière du désastre de tsunami, laissez-nous
tout le regard
à l'image plus grande et voyez
2005 comme année
d'arrangement
et de considération pour notre homme de camarade. Si le plus
mauvais vient au plus mauvais, nous pourrions aimer appeler
2005 l'année de la poule, parce que les poules ne rappellent
pas ou ne combattent pas leurs coeurs dehors.
(149
words)
Google’s
Translated text:
Un message lunaire
vietnamien de nouvelle année cher chacun, bien, l'année du
singe plus d'et de nouveau il est temps de se rappeler au
sujet des vies de la famille, car nous nous dirigeons dans
l'année du coq... Espérons
que l'année du
coq annonce dans un futur plus lumineux pour
tous les nous. Les
coqs n'essayeront pas 'de concurrencer l'un l'autre par leur
corneille plus forte
', comme les
vietnamiens disent souvent,
afin d'éviter l'agitation du monde d'année
dernière de War.
Also irakien,
à la lumière du désastre de tsunami, nous
laissent tout le regard
à l'image plus grande et voient
2005 comme année
de la compréhension et
de la considération pour notre homme de camarade.
Si le plus mauvais vient au plus mauvais, nous
pourrions aimer appeler 2005 l'année de la poule, parce que
les poules ne rappellent pas ou ne combattent pas leurs coeurs
dehors. (147 words)
Together with two more passages translated into French (See
Appendices A, B), I noted with my modest knowledge of French
that the Systran or Google translation:
- Does not follow strictly the format of the original
text, (ie. using the next lines, capital letters, etc.);
- When the exact French word cannot be found, the English
word or the foreign word is left as it is—untranslated;
- The translation is, in most cases, word-for-word;
- Word order is not sometimes clearly defined;
- When idiomatic expressions are used, the machine
“gives up”, by translating them literally instead;
- Lacks the naturalness and harmony of the target
language.
I have recently been involved in compiling a bilingual,
bi-directional dictionary of English-Vietnamese collocations
for advanced learners of English and for professional
translators and interpreters of English and Vietnamese. Even
doing it in the fastest time possible, it is still going to
take quite a few more years. Once the information and data has
been gathered for a database, I will then think seriously
about machine translation for Vietnamese. At this point in
time, while the Systran machine translation makes translations
of many languages available, including those Asian languages
such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean, the scripts of which are
so complex, but no less than Vietnamese, up to the present
time, Vietnamese is still not translated by Systran.
In so far as machine translation goes, it is natural
phenomenon that the translation will differ from the original
at the receiving end, particularly in relation to complicated
translations, which often involve literary works. I believe
that with translations about the weather or scientific
subjects it is not bad, because it is almost always pretty
straightforward. “What you see is what you get!”
particularly with languages that are similar both in syntactic
and lexical structure, such as English and French, and in
countries such as Canada which is bilingual.
My concern here is that I want to know what percentage of
accuracy the machine can achieve with an average level of
difficulty of the source text. A person’s life is too short
and the issue of translation requires a lot of time and
limitless perseverance. I was recently informed by a
Vietnamese Australian translator Ton That Quynh Du, presently
living in Canberra, that it took him two long hard years to
finish translating the story “Thien Su” (The Crystal
Messenger) by Pham Thi Hoai.
If the machine could translate 70 percent of the text with
accuracy, then the remaining 30 percent could be reserved for
the translator. It would then be a great thrill! A
professional translator can do two things: (1) Pre-editing and
(2) Post-editing, in order to assist the machine in what we
can anticipate, and that which we cannot. Let’s imagine that
if we have to translate 10 novels of 400 pages each with 500
words per page (10x400x500 = 2,000,000 words) from English
into Vietnamese and vice-versa, then what a bonus that would
be!
The right people for the right job! or as the English would
say: “Horses for courses” and Vietnamese people say:
“Dogs for guarding the house, cats are for catching
mice!”. In view of this, I would like to consult and confer
with one or more persons who are well-versed in information
technology (IT), so that we can carry out research together
about the mechanics and the principles of machine translation.
For my part, with the co-operation of those who share the same
expertise and passion, I would like to compare the two
languages, that is English and Vietnamese, in lexical as well
as syntactic structure for the purpose of translation, using a
computer-oriented approach. The aim would be to give
instructions as well as commands for the machine to follow. I
have no idea if there are any committees or group of experts
who have studied this issue or not in Vietnam or in other
developing countries. From uninformed sources, I have heard
that someone in Ho Chi Minh City has been awarded an American
scholarship to study for a PhD in the USA in machine
translation. Just recently, through Lotus (Hoa Sen)
College/University in Saigon there has sprung up a Vietnamese
group who have touched on doing research into this topic.
Whatever the truth is, I am in no position to check. If anyone
has any more information please let me know. I hereby reach
out to you ladies, gentlemen and friends, like an echo from
the abyss, to tell of my feelings about my long-held dream.
Once translation by machine becomes a reality for Vietnamese,
then translation will definitely be a profession for the
young, and a career that is rare and precious, and which, even
if you own many rice-fields, is beyond compare. Is it not true
that our ancestors told us: “A well-skilled trade will bring
you many great returns”?
Frank
N. Trinh
talawas
July, 2005
APPENDIX
A
Original
text:
Superstition:
Good or bad? In
Asian societies, people have a habit of being superstitious,
and this has been part of their everyday life.
Vietnamese people are no exception.
On such occasions as marriages, funerals and moving
house, people will try to choose a propitious date.
On the Vietnamese New Year, people believe that the
first person who visits their home during 'Tet' has a bearing
on their welfare for the whole year, and those who sweep the
floor on the first three days of this festive occasion might
sweep away their wealth.
As for other things such as setting out for an
examination, embarking on a business venture or planning an
escape from Communist Vietnam, people will try to avoid
"crossing the path of a woman", in much the same way
as Western people would try to avoid "crossing the path
of a black cat" when undertaking something important.
(149 words)
Systran’s
Translated text (Alta Vista Babel Fish):
Superstition
: Bon ou
mauvais ?
Dans les sociétés asiatiques, les gens ont une habitude d'être
superstitieux, et c'a fait partie de leur vie quotidienne. Les
vietnamiens ne sont aucune exception. À de telles occasions
que les mariages, les enterrements et la maison mobile, les
gens essayeront de choisir une date propice. La nouvelle année
vietnamienne, les gens croient que la première personne qui
visite leur maison pendant le 'Tet 'concerne leur bien-être
pendant toute l'année, et ceux qui balayent le plancher les
trois premiers jours de cette occasion de fête pourraient
balayer loin leur richesse. Quant à d'autres choses telles
que viser pour un examen, s'embarquant sur une entreprise
d'affaires ou projetant une évasion du Vietnam communiste,
les gens essayeront d'éviter "de croiser le chemin d'une
femme", plus ou moins de la même façon car les
personnes occidentales essayeraient d'éviter "de croiser
le chemin d'un chat noir" en entreprenant quelque chose
de important. (154 words)
Google’s
Translated text:
Superstition:
Bon ou mauvais?
Dans les sociétés asiatiques, les gens ont une
habitude d'être superstitieux, et c'a fait partie de leur vie
quotidienne. Les
vietnamiens ne sont aucune exception.
À de telles occasions que les mariages, les
enterrements et la maison mobile, les gens essayeront de
choisir une date propice.
La nouvelle année vietnamienne, les gens croient que
la première personne qui visite leur maison pendant le 'Tet
'concerne leur bien-être pendant toute l'année, et ceux qui
balayent le plancher les trois premiers jours de cette
occasion de fête pourraient balayer loin leur richesse.
Quant à d'autres choses telles que viser pour un
examen, s'embarquant sur une entreprise d'affaires ou
projetant une évasion du Vietnam communiste, les gens
essayeront d'éviter "de croiser le chemin d'une
femme", plus ou moins de la même façon car les
personnes occidentales essayeraient d'éviter "de croiser
le chemin d'un chat noir" en entreprenant quelque chose
de important. (152 words)
APPENDIX
B
Original
text:
Lullaby
to a lover
The
blanket of the night is falling,
As I lullaby you, my beloved, to sleep,
On a deep Winter’s evening,
Full of endless emptiness ...
Lull-a-lull-a-lull-a by ...
Lay
your sleepy head on my waiting shoulder,
Your flirting hands entwined in mine,
Your arms still and slumberous ...
Lull-a-lull-a-lull-a by ...
Sleep,
sleep, my lover,
And dream celestial dances,
Sleep, sleep, my lover,
And dream of Paradise ...
(72
words)
Systran’s
Translated text (Alta Vista Babel Fish):
Berceuse
à un amoureux La couverture de la nuit tombe, car je vous
apaise, mon aimé, pour dormir, la soirée d'un hiver profond,
pleine du vide
sans fin... Accalmie-un-accalmie-un-accalmie-un par... Étendez
votre tête somnolente sur mon épaule d'attente, vos
mains flirtantes
toujours
enlacerées
dans le mien, vos bras et slumberous...
Accalmie-un-accalmie-un-accalmie-un par... Sommeil, sommeil,
mon amoureux, et danses célestes rêveuses, sommeil, sommeil,
mon amoureux, et rêve du paradis... (68 words)
Google’s
Translated text:
Apaisez
à un amoureux que la couverture de la nuit tombe, car je vous
apaise, mon aimé, pour dormir, la soirée d'un hiver profond,
pleine
de l'emptiness
sans fin... Accalmie-un-accalmie-un-accalmie-un
par... Étendez
votre tête somnolente sur mon épaule d'attente, vos
mains flirting
toujours
enlacerées
dans le mien, vos bras et slumberous...
Accalmie-un-accalmie-un-accalmie-un par...
Sommeil, sommeil, mon amoureux, et danses célestes rêveuses,
sommeil, sommeil, mon amoureux, et rêve du paradis...
(69 words)
Frank
Trinh
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