{Dear CMO:A funny thing happened the other day that I thought would make an appropriate blog post. Looking through Technorati, I noticed a link from a blogger who I thought at first was blogging from France. As it turned out, he was French Canadian, supporting a piece I had written on, of course, blogging}.
{I don’t speak French. At all. So I wasn’t sure exactly what was being said about me. My nine year old son, Nick – also a blogger (sorry, password protected) – looked over my shoulder and suggested I Google the text to translate it. My son. Who is nine years old. And who blogs. Told me to translate the text. On Google}.
{This may not sound like much to you but it was a rather dramatic shift of events to me. I’m in my 40’s. I was living in Tokyo back in the early days of the Apple II computer. I had one of the first MCI Mail accounts. I posted on old Tokyo User Group bulletin boards. And now, Nick tells me how to translate posts in foreign languages. Oh boy}.
{A brief look at Feedburner tells me that my subscribers are logging in from Thailand, France, Italy, the Netherlands, the UK, Japan, Italy, Korea, Indonesia, and elsewhere. I’m occasionally picked up by Chinese bloggers. I have no idea why, but I am}.
{The imponderable in all of this, for me, is this: by the time my newborn comes of age, language may be less an impediment to communication than dialect. Written (maybe voice?) communication will be “personalized” on the fly into whatever language makes the most sense to me}.
{It’s all flying cars to me, but my son would probably shrug}.
The translations are pretty clunky, but for the most part one could glean something. My blog is often washed through Google translation for French, Spanish and Italian. I cringe when I read it as a person would never, ever talk (or write) like that 😉
Valeria: yes, they’re clunky, but you’re not expecting flowing language when you squeeze it through Google. When I translated the French/Canadian post into English, it wasn’t perfect — but I got it. And that was the big point for me. It was good enough to understand. I may have missed some nuance, but the meaning — which was completely missing before — was captured.
Hello, I am a subscriber of your brilliant blog, and I am a Chinese living in Beijing. I found your blog several months ago when searching on Google for blogs about Marketing, and I was attracted immediately by the easy language and profound ideas. Such is how a Chinese came across your blog 🙂 By the way, the translation Google did for the Chinese sentence is not quite accurate. It should be “对我来说这一切就像飞行车一样神奇,但我的儿子只会毫不在意的耸耸肩”
Kitty: thank you so much for commenting! I hope the sentence itself was (almost) clear — it’s been a long time since I could actually read Japanese, but I can see an understandable mistake or two in that particular paragraph.
I certainly don’t blame Google for not understanding how to handle colloquial expressions — but that was part of the fun in writing the post. You know it will only make about half of the sense it should, but that’s probably enough to grasp the content (if not the style).
Thank you again for commenting!
I’m also a subscriber to your brilliant blog. I think it’s neat that your sophisticated readers are able to make corrections to Google’s translations.
(It would be interesting to see what a Google translation of Yogi Berra into Chinese and then back to English again would be like.)