It
all started with a business request. After an overwhelming delivery of a
project within a short term, the customer in Russia was happy to hand me over a
long list of requirements. The problem: The city names were all written in Russian, and
the time to work on the business proposal was very less. He was quick to direct
me towards Google to address this issue and get going as quick as I can. Quite
a good idea. It was surprisingly quick. The one special kind of translation
Google has that Yahoo hasn't: the ability to translate a file. Select and
upload. The good thing is that Google tries not to mess up the formatting of
the file (mine was an Excel table with place names. Good job, Google!). But the
problem wasn't over.
Google Translator's job is to translate. Literally every word of it. Well, if the
entry is a sentence, the Translator does the additional job of making sense out of it and presents a clear message. Since I'm using translators almost every
day since the past five years or so, I have learned the art of communicating
with simple messages so that the person using a translator at the other end understands
my idea well. But translating names is a different ball game altogether. It
just needs the expression of the original term in a different language, not the
exact meaning. So I had to write back to the customer citing that English place
names is necessary, because I am not able to locate many cities in the map. Try
translating the city name “Yellowknife” to Chinese and ask a Chinese man to
locate it in the map of Canada!
With
limited time to demarcate the city areas, it was a literal firefight to locate
city names like “Electric steel” and “Queen + Anniversary” on the map. I shook up my
hitherto inactive Russian basics and got the job done. Two days after I finished the job,
the apologetic customer (himself a Chinese) got back to me with a detailed list
of city names in English.
The follwoing weekend, while traveling on the Metro during my weekend pilgrimage to
the library, I stumbled upon the announcements in English and Hindi:
What
if the English messages were just translations of original messages in Hindi?
What if they tried Google to make instant translations? Will they face the same
trouble that I did? I was curious. I was thinking and laughing to myself during
the following part of journey. Imagine this:
NOIDA Sector Pandrah
NOIDA
Sector Fifteen
Agla station New Ashok Nagar hai
“The
next station is New No-Unhappy City”
Mayur Vihar
“Peacock
Park”
Akshar Dhaam station
“Letter-House
station”
Pragati Maidaan
“Development
Ground”
Rajiv Chowk
“Former
Prime Minister breathless!” (Oops! That looks like designing cryptic clues to a
crossword puzzle.) Sorry, I made that up.
Check-out
the Metro Map and you will know what I was thinking.
Image Courtesy: SayWhyDoI.com
