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Right, but I don't think many people expect machine translation to do better than that. And I don't think the ability to do good translations is quite as rare among bilinguals as you're making out. Even kids tend to be pretty good at it according to some research: https://web.stanford.edu/~hakuta/www/research/publications/(...

> They are frequently contorted, using syntaxes that hardly appear in any natural sentences, and riddled with useless or wrong pronouns.

I find it hard to believe that this is the case if the translator is a native speaker of the target language. I mean, I might do a bad job of translating a Spanish text to English (because my Spanish sucks), but my translation isn't going to be bad English, it's just going to be inaccurate.




Consider yourself lucky, then. You are speaking English, with its thousands (if not millions) of competent translators translating everything remotely interesting from other languages. The bar for "good translation" is kept reasonably high for English.

As a Korean speaker, if I walk into a bookstore and pick up any book translated from English, and read a page or two, chances are that I will find at least one sentence where I can see what the original English expression must have been, because the translator chose a wrong Korean word which sticks out like a sore thumb. Like, using a word for "(economic/technological) development" to describe "advanced cancer". Or translating "it may seem excessive [to the reader] ..." into "we can consider it as excessive ..."

And yes, these translators don't think twice about making sentences that no native speaker would be caught speaking. Some even defends the practice by saying they are faithful to the European syntax of the original text! Gah.


> Like, using a word for "(economic/technological) development" to describe "advanced cancer"

That sounds like a mistake caused by the translator having a (relatively) poor knowledge of English. A bilingual English/Korean speaker wouldn't make that mistake. I mean, I don't know your linguistic background, but you clearly know enough English and Korean to know that that's a bad translation, and you presumably wouldn't have made the same mistake if you'd been translating the book.

>Some even defends the practice by saying they are faithful to the European syntax of the original text!

I think there's always a tension between making the translation faithful to the original text and making it idiomatic. That's partly a matter of taste, especially in literature.


> A bilingual English/Korean speaker wouldn't make that mistake.

Well, "bilingual" is not black and white. I think you have a point here, but considering that people who are paid to translate can't get these stuff right, the argument veers into the territory of "no true bilingual person".

Anyway, my pet theory is that it is surprisingly hard to translate from language A to B, even when you are reasonably good at both A and B. Our brain is wired to spontaneously generate sentences: given a situation, it effortlessly generates a sentence that perfectly matches it. Unfortunately, it is not trained at all for "Given this sentence in language A, re-create the same situation in your mind and generate a sentence in language B that conveys the same meaning." In a sense, it is like acting. Everybody can laugh on their own: to convincingly portray someone else laughing is quite another matter.


Perhaps they're already using mechanical translation and then only correcting sentences that are basically ungrammatical, not just weird.


People paid to do something are rarely the best at it.

They are however consistent since their pay check depends on it.


>Well, "bilingual" is not black and white.

Not entirely, but it is definitely possible for someone to be a native speaker of two languages, and they wouldn't make those kinds of mistakes if they were.




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