Spanish Machine Translation
I just got an email the other day about a Spanish machine translation website that people can use to see if the translations they have received have actually been translated by professional human translators or have in fact been translated by one of three online machine translation sites: Google, Bing, or Yahoo.
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Actually the website (www.TranslatorDetector.com) does more than just Spanish machine translation. You can input any language source text (at least a language recognized by one of the machine translation search engines) and then input the existing translated text.
So how does the Machine Translation Detector work? First, you take original source text and paste that into a window. Then, you take the translation of that source text (either the translation done by a professional translator, or the translation text from an online Spanish machine translation engine) and then hit the compare button.
After you enter the source and translated text, you get your results.
The results are actually a percentage of confidence that the translated text you entered was done either by a human or by machine. The results bar also gives you a percentage guess of which translation service (Google, Bing, or Yahoo) most likely was used to translate the text, if in fact it was translated by online translation software.
Enough talk, though. Let's try it out.
First I took a paragraph of English text about the Nintendo Wii from Wikipedia and put that in the Source Text box.
I then found the corresponding Spanish text and pasted that in the Existing Translation Text box.
Then it's just a matter of hitting the Compare button and seeing the results that are presented. For this particular text, I got the following results:
So the TranslatorDetector did OK, judging that the translated text was probably not translated by Spanish machine translation software. Not bad.
However, I then took the same source English text and had it translated with the Google Translation engine. I pasted that translated text into the Existing Translation Text box and compared it. I got a 99% percent overall match that the text was a machine translation. In addition, the software also detected that the text was translated by Google, as can be seen in the image below:
Conclusions
Now most translation clients should not have to worry whether the translator they are using is actually using Spanish machine translation software to do their translations. If that is the case, the client has a lot more to worry about then checking to see if the translation was produced by a human or not.
However, this is a fun tool that you might enjoy playing with as you translate. You might even want to put in your own translations of texts that you've done and then see how the TranslatorDetector judges your translations!
Let me know if you try it out and what YOUR results are.
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