Why you need never learn a foreign language again (almost)

Google Translate has started to act as a mobile interpreter. So far, it only translates between Spanish and English, but you can see the potential.

With a mobile device held between you and a foreign-language speaker, you take it in turns to press a button, say something into the microphone and wait for the translation to be spoken from the device in the other language. A little laborious, but portable and free.

It's not perfect yet, as the demo at a recent Google conference showed. Translating between German and English, one phrase took a few repeats before eliciting the correct English.

And of course, without a real interpreter present, neither party knows if there's been a mistranslation. No doubt there's a clause somewhere in the terms and conditions to save Google from the legal consequences of expensive misunderstandings.

The deficiencies of Google Translate can be demonstrated all too easily. Just translate a piece of English into another language and then turn the result back into English. The more you do it, the weirder it gets.

The paragraph above turned into and then out of Azerbaijani is:

"GoogleTranslateforall theshortcomingscan beeasilydisplayed.Onlya bit of Englishand otherlanguageand thentranslatedbackinto Englishas a result of open.Moreso, theweirderitgets."

Repeating the exercise with the new text, you get: 

"For all the shortcomings, you can easily Google Translate. After just a bit of English and other language and translated into English as a result of an open back. So again this is weirder."

A cruel trick to play on a no doubt brilliantly sophisticated piece of software. Or, as the Vietnamese would have it: 

Một thủ thuật Ä‘á»™c ác Ä‘ể chÆ¡i trên một nghi ngờ không rá»±c rỡ tinh vi phần của phần mềm. 

Or perhaps they wouldn't.