Osugi Sakae

I just learned about Translation Party from this article on BBspot, so I went over to try it out.

Translation Party is an interesting idea and pretty cool to play with. The idea is to translate an English sentence into Japanese, take the resulting Japanese sentence and translate it back into English, and repeat this until the results “reach equilibrium”. Equilibrium is when the English in and English out match. It doesn’t have to be the original English, just any E1 -> J -> E2 where E1 and E2 are the same.

The coolest thing for me was to try out some phrases that I knew caused my students in Japan a lot of trouble. Often changing a single word in a sentence led to total meltdown — both with my students and with Translation Party. The weirdest example comes from my time teaching high school students.

Most of my students could answer “How are you?” just fine (provided you consider “I’m fine thank you. And you?” an acceptable response) but ask them “How are you today?” and some would look at me like I was speaking Klingon. Remember, these kids had already studied English in school several times a week for over three years, so this was a totally unexpected response to what I thought was a simple question.

First I put “this is a test” into Translation Party. It reached equilibrium after about 2 iterations and complained to me about not capitalizing correctly. Sure enough, “This is a test.” reached equilibrium in only 1 iteration (English into Japanese back into identical English; finished).

Having learned that Translation Party cares about capitalization, I put in “How are you?” As with “This is a test.”, “How are you?” reached equilibrium in 1 iteration (which technically speaking may not be an iteration because it didn’t repeat?).

Interestingly, totally unlike the two examples above, “how are you today?” and “How are you today?” returned entirely different results. “How are you today?” (proper capitalization) finished after one iteration, but it had turned into “How does it feel?” The exact sequence was:


How are you today?
気分はどうですか？
How does it feel?
どのようにそれを感じる？
How does it feel?


“how are you today?” however ended up alternating between two meaningless sentences and never reached equilibrium:

how are you today?
どのように今日は何ですか？
What is today what?
今日は何？
The day?
日だったの？
Was the day?
一日になりましたか？
How did a day?
どのように一日のですか？
What day is it?
何曜日は何ですか？
What is What day?
何何曜日ですか？
What day do you?
何曜日ですか？
What day you?
何曜日がお？
What day are you?
何曜日ですか？
[same sequence repeated about ten more times]
[Translation Party stopped because the phrases would never reach equilibrium]


Just like with my students, Translation Party couldn’t come up with an acceptable translation of “how are you today?” (I was speaking with my students, so capitalization was not an issue in their [mis-]understanding.) In fact, the very first Japanese translation is totally incorrect: どのように今日は何ですか？ makes about as much sense (to me at any rate) in Japanese as the translation “What is today what?” does in English.

Granted, humans are still much better translators than are machines, but as any good ESOL teacher can tell you, you have to be careful with the English you use because you can never be sure exactly how it is going to be understood by the students. Sometimes what you think is an easy sentence somehow ends up confusing some students. Plenty of times in Japanese I knew every word in the sentence but had no idea at all what the intended meaning was, and I felt like I imagine Translation Party felt when it was choking on “how are you today?”. And I was already fairly competent with the language, so you can imagine what school must be like for English learners trying to learn English as well as subject area content from teachers who are not familiar with the challenges that second language learners face. Teachers who overuse idioms and cultural references, I’m looking at you!

Having real ESL or EFL students do something similar to what Translation Party does (give one student an English sentence and have him or her translate it into his or her native language. Give that sentence to another native speaker and have that student translate it back into English; lather; rinse; repeat) could be very interesting and might even help teachers pinpoint exactly what words or phrases are causing students difficulty. This technique could be specially useful with languages that teachers do not know enough about to understand possible sources of interference.

Anyhow, I suspect that Translation Party is just a hint of the sorts of things we will be doing with machine translation in the near future and am looking forward to seeing how we can apply this sort of technology in the classroom to help students acquire English faster, smarter, and better.