Soup Reversal

posted 2006-10-11 15:10:58
by Eric Silberstein

I had some fascinating meetings in China over the past two weeks.  I timed my trip so I could attend the most recent TAUS (Translation Automation User Society) forum in Beijing.  The forum is really focused on machine translation although it also covers other technology for doing translation more efficiently.

We’ve been doing quite a bit of work with MT.  It started with one of our customers and expanded into a whole new set of features and integrations in WorldServer.  Because of this I was eager to hear what others are doing.  Nearly all of the speakers who are using MT as part of a larger translation process spoke to the need for capable post-editors.  The idea is that post-editing machine translated text requires different skills than direct translation.  You still need someone who is bilingual to verify that the translated text is accurate and comprehensive, but the person needs to become fast at things such as assessing if a few tweaks to the text will do the trick or if they should delete and start from scratch.  This is a big shift for someone who may have spent fifteen years honing her brain to grok source and write target.  As production use of MT grows we should see more freelancers develop the post-editing skill.

So MT and post-editing were fresh in my mind when I walked into Beijing’s famous silk market on Sunday and got handed this coupon (go here for the Chinese version). 



Now what is “soup reversal” and how can a single pizza be consumed by 200 people?  For fun I walked up to the 6^th floor, asked for the manager, and after a few suspicious looks explained that their coupon didn’t make any sense and I wanted to help them translate it.  The manager knew the translation was weird because some of their foreign customers couldn’t understand the coupon terms.

So we sat down at the bar, talked through each item, and I wrote them out in idiomatic English.  It turns out that that they used online machine translation, so really for me it was a practical opportunity to try some post-editing.  It’s really hard.  For example, you know that “in charge of more than 50 species of Pizza” sounds wrong, but once you read that it’s hard to get the right phrasing.  The post-editor also needs to watch out for untranslated words.  The “Dingcan telephone” text is there because the MT engine transliterated 订餐 instead of translating it.  You can also see why it’s important to read the source.  The source talks about a buffet with 40 dishes, but since the same word (菜)　can mean dish or vegetable, the MT engine translated it into “40 kinds of vegetables.”  Well, I’d still rather eat 40 vegetables than soup reversal!

And speaking of soup reversal, I was sharing this story with one of our UK guys and his first reaction was “forget about the bad translation, what about the name?”  In British English “pavement pizza,” like “kerbside quiche” in Australian English, has an especially unappetizing meaning. You can read about it here on effingpot.com (scroll down until you see the entry for pavement pizza).

I wonder if they will actually reprint the coupon with the improved translation.  If you’re at the silk market stop by the 6^th floor and let me know!

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