Limewoods

Planning a weekend break last month, I settled upon a page of the award winning Lincolnshire County Council (LCC) website about Bardney Limewoods with a view to finding a country walk. In the way of things, I could not resist clicking on the colourful national flags on the bottom left of the screen. Powered by Systran, these offered me a translation of the current page into French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Mandarin, Polish or Italian.
Without further ado, I reproduce here a fragment of the original Limewoods page and the Systran machine translation into French:

The Lincolnshire Limewoods area is steeped in history and rich in wildlife. Discover ancient woodlands and quiet countryside or step back in time at one of the Limewoods numerous archaeological sites - the Limewoods area is wild and waiting to be explored. The woods are special because they are one of the few areas of woodlands characterised by small-leaved lime remaining in Britain.

La région de Lincolnshire Limewoods est trempée dans l'histoire et les riches dans la faune [1]. Découvrez les régfions [2] boisées antiques et le dos tranquille de campagne ou d'étape à temps [3]être explorée un des nombreux emplacements archéologiques de Limewoods - la région de Limewoods est sauvage et attendante pour être explorée [4]. Les bois sont spéciaux parce qu'ils sont l'un des quelques secteurs des régfions boisées caractérisées par la petite-leaved chaux restante[5] en Grande-Bretagne.

Here are but a few of the mistakes in the French:
[1] The sense of the French is `and riches in the fauna'.
[2] There seems to be a problem with the spelling of `régions'
[3] The French is pure gibberish! (literally `the quiet back of countryside or stopover in time ')
[4] This attempt at a literal translation is completely ungrammatical in French! The participle here describes an action being perfomed, and is therefore a pure participle and so invariant.
`attend d' être explorée' would be much better here
[5] Lots wrong here. First `chaux' refers to the mineral `lime' rather than the tree!
The French for `small-leaved lime' is `tilleul à petites feuilles'. Again the participle is invariant (even if it were not, there is nothing feminine singular in the sentence with which it could possibly agree!)

As you can see, even this short fragment of French translation is riddled with rather serious errors some of which distort the meaning and others of which make it totally incomprehensible in parts.

As a professional translator and Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Linguists, I cannot support the publication of inaccurate translations such as this. As part of my work I also teach translation (albeit from French to English) for City University, London and would fail outright any student scripts which fell so far below an acceptable level for publication. In fact, translators submitting paid work of this nature to a client might reasonably expect to see their work rejected if there is a checker in the loop (indeed EN 15038: 2006, the European Quality Standard for Translation Services includes a requirement for independent checking).

Why then does it become acceptable in some eyes to publish a machine translation which falls far below standard? Strangely, the justification can be found on Systran's own site which contains a case study of the LCC website! The argument is that the costs of providing a good translation would be prohibitive and that therefore it is permissible to publish machine translations knowing that they contain errors. I wonder in which other areas of business respectable organisations can deliberately and knowingly get away with producing defective products on the cheap? Certainly LCC would not tolerate so many errors in the original English version of its website. I suspect that the errors in the foreign-language versions become admissible because no one has actually been employed to read what is being put out on the LCC website in the Council's name. It suffices that the foreign-language versions are available, the pretty flags help win website awards.

From Berlin to Istanbul via Manchester
And so it came about that I began to write to this blog. Last weekend, Treffpunkt Manchester, I was delighted to attend the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD, German Academic Exchange Service) `alumni conference', marking the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and exploring current opportunities for British-German collaboration in a changing world'.

Dr Christian Bode, Secretary General of the DAAD, addressing the conference.




Academics, diplomats, barristers and a wide range of other former DAAD students met at the Chancellors Hotel in Manchester from 11 to 13 September to the discuss the story of Germany and also that of the DAAD over the past 20 years. It was natural that the conference should focus on events in Berlin, from the fall of the Wall, through German reunification and the reinstallation of Berlin as capital city, to plans to commemorate recent German history there.

In fact, this emphasis on Berlin was very apposite for me, as I had recently seen my son off on a flight to Schönefeld where he was to join three fellow students on a charity cycle ride of some 1800 miles from Berlin to Istanbul.The trip was to raise funds for Camfed and for Teenage Cancer Trust. It would last for one month cross seven countries, climbing over two large mountain ranges and visiting four capital cities. Would that I might have accompanied the cyclists as driver of a team car! Details of the cycle ride can be found, together with photographs on Berlin to Istanbul blog