Le Tribune which is a leading French business newspaper has risked public ridicule by using automatic translation for its website. A sample of some weird headlines follows –
“Internet Explorer: mistrust!”
“Ryanair loan to make travel of the passengers upright”
“Assets of the continental right in management of the crisis”
“The Chinese car in ambush”
In spite of such unfortunate results Le Tribune’s editors are pretty sure that their project will be successful. According to them it is still at an experimental stage and the translation software is being refined. A human translation expert would be soon hired to modify the text as required. To be fair, most of the articles translated into English were reasonably comprehensible though odd to read, but that may not be true for other languages. Right now the website is being translated from French to English, Italian, Spanish and German in real time; Chinese and Japanese will be added by the end of the year.
In contrast the BBC website is translated into 30 languages with several hundred journalists working on them. The BBC, as of now does not intend to follow Le Tribune’s model for web site translation though it would mean substantial cost saving.
Le Tribune is the second highest selling business daily and this translation project has been set in motion to make it accessible to new readers across the world. However critics of the project fear that the project may tarnish the image of Le Tribune which is otherwise highly respected in France.
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