Bilingual Adventures

by Dan Hope, Reviewer

As technology has improved, it has become far too tempting to use it to do things we know nothing about. Of course, it’s simply our nature to try to look better than we are: makeup to cover the blemishes, deodorant to cover the sweat and a computer to cover our calculus homework. That’s really the secret behind rocket science, after all: a few guys to do “thought experiments” and a whole room of supercomputers to prove that asteroid A will hit planet B at 5 degrees above the equator in exactly 22 hours, 3 minutes and 25.22846 seconds. Let’s see you do that, Mr. Einstein.

The same holds true in far more innocuous subjects, like Spanish. Millions of people speak it fluently, presumably making it less difficult than rocket science. But those of us who can’t speak it are still tempted to use translation software to make us look like we’re bilingual, which will get you a lot more friends at a party than if you could predict an imminent asteroid impact.

But the problem is that we too often rely on technology that is not quite good enough for the job. I’ve heard of a lot of people using Google Translate or Babel Fish Translation to translate things into other languages. I decided to give these translation sites a test drive to see if they can really make me look bilingual, or just bilateral.

I first tried translating the first few paragraphs of Don Quixote de la Mancha, a famous Spanish novel, just to see if I could get anything intelligible. It didn’t translate all the words, leaving the sentences strewn with Spanish and giving me phrases like this:

“A pot of something else that cow ram, salpic