u/moonlight448

Google Translate is inarguably a very useful tool. It has helped countless people in foreign countries and places communicate their needs better where they would otherwise not have been able to. However, as a whole, I think tools like these mark an irreversible place in time that will lead to far worse translation throughout literature in the general sense.

‘The first lesson any good translator internalizes is that there exists no one-to-one correlation between words or even concepts from one language to another. The Swiss philologist Johann Breitinger, who claimed that languages were merely “collections of totally equivalent words and locutions which are interchangeable, and which fully correspond to each other in meaning”, was dreadfully wrong. Language is not like maths. And even maths differs depending on the language’ (R.F. Kuang, Babel).

You cannot simply plug any two words into a machine and get a one for one translation. There will always be something lost in that exchange. Translation is about finding a way to convey what an author was trying to say, in the spirit of how they were trying to say it, in a way that the new audience you are translating for will understand. If you either translate word for word what someone is trying to say only using the literal meanings, or only take the spirit of what they were trying to say without preserving any of the original words, both ways you lose out on something that the author was saying.

Yes, Google Translate is great for putting in an order at a restaurant in a country you don’t speak the language of, but when people start using tools like this for any sort more complicated purpose, meaning will be lost. God forbid a tool like that would be used for an entire book, or even a poem.

It may come off as legible, but you’re not getting everything the author was communicating.

And the problem is these tools are being used these ways. Any Translation Studies student will tell you, it is a dying field****. Less translators are being hired, and more books are just being put word for word into Google Translate or some other online tool.

It is a betrayal to writers.

Tools like that will always be worse than a human.

**** ‘dying field’ is actually a great example. Put that in a translator to a different language and it may come out with ‘translation studies is a dying meadow’. The reader will understand what I was saying, but any human versed in both languages would know that I did not in fact mean ‘meadow’, I of course meant something closer to ‘profession’.