New mobile technologies bring translation blunders and successes to your fingertips

The cellular world has recently set the internet abuzz with news of some mobile branding translation blunders.

Nokia, for example, named its newest Windows smartphone the “Lumia,” an obscure Spanish word for lady of the night that is now more well known than Nokia would like.

Similarly, Apple's iOS personal assistant application is called “Siri,” a word that means nothing in Japanese, but sounds — when pronounced by a native Japanese speaker — like the Japanese word “shiri,” meaning buttocks. Apple's decision not to release Siri in Japan may possibly be related to this unfortunate homophone.

These brand names, like so many others, obviously do not translate well. However, in general, smartphones and other mobile devices are becoming increasingly useful to conducting business in our multilingual world.

International business travelers and others can make particularly practical use of machine translation when mobile devices integrate this technology with speech recognition or optical character recognition (OCR).

For example, the Google Goggles app can scan a French menu item reading “PatÉ de Canard,” and — if it successfully recognizes the text and internet access is available — will send that text to Google Translate to reveal the English translation of “Duck PatÉ”. Similarly, when Google Translate integrates with voice recognition for “conversation mode,” two people speaking different languages can actually carry on basic conversations, as demonstrated on YouTube by English-speaking girls who used an early version of this function — albeit on a PC — to order Indian food over the phone in Hindi.

The availability of wireless Internet makes these mobile translation applications all the more successful. The power of the translation engine is no longer limited to a mobile device’s hard drive size and processor speed because the translation can be processed in the cloud. Likewise, this connection to the cloud enables users to select the best of multiple translation options or to contribute better translations — a manner of real-time, crowdsourced quality control.

However, like any machine translation technologies, these mobile implementations have not created the miraculous science-fiction cure-all we see in the universal translator on Star trek or the Babelfish of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In fact, mashing up automatic translation with OCR or voice recognition is like adding another link in the popular children’s game of telephone, which illustrates the errors created when messages are passed down a line.