{"id":1406,"date":"2022-04-26T05:55:49","date_gmt":"2022-04-26T10:55:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/?p=1406"},"modified":"2022-04-26T05:55:49","modified_gmt":"2022-04-26T10:55:49","slug":"the-best-translation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/2022\/04\/26\/the-best-translation\/","title":{"rendered":"The Best Translation"},"content":{"rendered":"

We all know the feeling, you\u2019ve found a reference to a newspaper article from 1920s Paris, you\u2019ve tracked it down in Gallica, and finally you\u2019re ready to learn about the Parisian musical landscape. As the scan slowly loads in you let out a sigh of despair, \u201cah beans, you can\u2019t actually read French. As preposterous as it is that old French newspapers didn\u2019t bother translating themselves into English for our convenience, it is the unfortunate world we live in. What is one to do when faced with such a challenge? Of course asking someone to translate it for you works, however when you have many long articles to translate this isn\u2019t feasible unless you have an extremely large number of French speaking friends. So, weary and broken, we turn to the devil of shoddy translation, Google translate.<\/span><\/p>\n

(cue thunder and lightning)<\/span><\/p>\n

I have seen Google translate before in language classes, often with\u2026 interesting results. It can be fun to see what happens when translating a text to another language and then back. And yet, it\u2019s actually a really useful tool for research. The difference is that language classes focus on the details of grammar, which is useful to become fluent in a language but isn\u2019t necessary for understanding an article. One could imagine being able to piece together meaning even if just given definitions of each word. Google translate isn\u2019t a perfect tool, but it doesn\u2019t have to be. And I think that its perception has been unfairly maligned by using it in the wrong way. So what might be a better use case? Let\u2019s dig out that old French newspaper again. We\u2019ve found what appears to be the right section, something tells me I can find music related things on the page labeled \u201cles arts\u201d, and I think I can also figure out what \u201ctheatres\u201d and \u201cmusic-halls\u201d translate to. In this case the newspaper is an image file so we can\u2019t directly copy text, and the Gallica OCR can\u2019t show where the text came from in the document. Fortunately, Google Lens can take an image from your camera, grab the text, and then translate it. OCR certainly doesn\u2019t make translation more accurate, but it\u2019s good enough to find the \u201ctoday\u201d section where all the concerts are listed. Machine translation isn\u2019t bad or good, but it\u2019s important to understand its applications and limits. The best translation is the one you can actually get, even if it kinda sucks.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We all know the feeling, you\u2019ve found a reference to a newspaper article from 1920s Paris, you\u2019ve tracked it down in Gallica, and finally you\u2019re ready to learn about the Parisian musical landscape. As the scan slowly loads in you let out a sigh of despair, \u201cah beans, you can\u2019t actually read French. As preposterous […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4373,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4373"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1406"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1407,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1406\/revisions\/1407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}