Automatic French translation page to be suspended tomorrow

The automatic French translation service will be temporarily suspended tomorrow pending a required upgrade.

The site's dictionary, professional translation service and other features will remain unaffected.

For news of when the automatic service is reinstated, you may wish to follow @BitterCoffey on Twitter.

Planned updates to automatic translation service

Some improvements are planned for the automatic French translator provided for free on the French Linguistics site. These changes include:

• improvements to the translations provided;
• improvements to the "SMS decoder" function that is built into the translator;
• improvements to additional information provided alongside translations.

If you have used the translator and have any suggestions/observations, then please feel free to tweet them to @BitterCoffey or add them as a note here.

When machine translation is subtly disastrous

We're used to seeing machine translation which is so disastrously wrong that the error is obvious to the point of being ridiculous. But what about when machine translation produces apparently fluent translations but with serious errors that are more difficult to detect?

Your favourite translation blunder...?

You may have seen the report of Acer's slight translation mishap which I have also reported on the French Linguistics site today for all to share in their amusement.

But perhaps you have some better examples to share with the world? Perhaps you took a photograph of an amusingly embarrassing sign mistranslation while on your holidays? Let me know at translation@french-linguistics.co.uk -- there may also be a small reward in it for those who present the best examples!

Context-sensitive phrases enabled in the automatic trandslator

Those who have been using the automatic French translator may recall that some time ago, the translator included a "context-sensitive" feature offering a set of common phrases alongside the translation. For example, if you were asking the translator for what appeared to be the translation of a business letter, a list of common letter openings and closures would be included.

This feature had to be disabled a few months ago when a change was made to the translation system. However, it has now been re-enabled.

Any feedback and suggestions on this feature or any parts of the site are always welcome.

French-English text translation tool

An initial version of this site's automatic French/English translation tool is available. The tool is designed to complement the site's dictionary as follows:

• The dictionary is intended for use by students, learners, translators etc who basically understand some French but need to find out about the translation or uses of an isolated word or phrase;
• The translation tool is aimed more at English speakers who need to get the gist of an entire French text (or vice versa for French speakers with an English text), typically when they understand very little of the target language.

In practice, initial tests show that learners and users of the language are also finding it useful to look up phrases using the translation tool. You should just be aware of limitations of the automatic translation, and may like to take a look at the accompanying tips on using machine translation.

About the translation system

Many of the text translations are produced by Google Translate, a statistical machine translation system developed by Google which allows sites such as this to query and build on the translation system. However, this site's tool also builds some additional features on top of the Google system:

• it is assumed that the language pair you are working with is French/English; the site will detect which of these two languages is being entered and translate to the other language;
• some orthographic corrections are made to the input text which help to get a better result from Google;
• in some cases, alternative inputs will be run simultaneously through the Google system when such inputs are known to improve the translation results (such alternatives and their translations are always listed alongside the original query);
• in some cases, instead of using the Google system, a translation is pulled directly from this site's dictionary data. Note that the source of the translation is always clearly indicated.

The above features are being actively improved on the basis of the typical use to which users are putting the system.

Known limitations

The system works best on texts that are similar to the types of text that the system has been trained on. Google Translate is a statistical system, trained on sets of existing translations. In practice, this means the system works well on "the types of text that people tend to translate". For example, whole sentences or passages from commercial or technical texts work quite well. Isolated words and phrases, particularly when they have a "dangling" word such as a preposition, sometimes don't work as well. You may also find what you consider to be quite a "basic" phrase or question doesn't translate so well, because a phrase used in everyday speech didn't crop up in the material that the translation system was trained on.