Some how I keep believing that the internet is going to become the next “Tower of Babel” with all of these innovations that are bring us together linguistically. Have you ever thought about that?
Sure there’s a difference now between where we are historically and what occured in the Old Testament, but I think it’s a fascinating thing, to say the least.
Translating your Google Doc into one of the 53 available languages is as easy as pushing a button:
Sweet!
Just another reason I’ve been using Google Docs more and more. Have you ever considered the switch?
If not, here are 10 reasons to think about.
Joanna says
But how good is the translation quality?
BenJPickett says
Coming from other languages to English is usually pretty good. On the other hand going from English to say German or French from what I’ve been told isn’t always that great. From my experience going to Spanish isn’t a win either and the problem is because of dialects and translation. It takes word for rather than an idea so if you’re talking about the head of a department it may come across after the translation as chief of the organization, and in large organizations there is a huge difference. And that can askew the message you’re trying to send.
On the other side you have dialects. With Spanish, they are actually only spoken in a very small percentage of the countries that speak those languages. Each culture has adapted minute differences for pronunciation and some words are entirely different. If you speak Spanish in Mexico and then go to Spain, you may not be able to understand everything because Spain is so proper and the Spanish spoken in Mexico is a mix from Spanish slang spoken by prisoners and military a few hundred years ago and that got blended in with the natives to the area at the time. Go to Argentina and the Spanish there has picked up a little bit of an English influence and uses words that are considered improper in Mexico. Head to the Basque Country of Spain and they understand Spanish but they don’t speak it, they have there own culture and language, which unfortunately isn’t recognized by the rest of the country.
The problem from what I’ve seen isn’t with these other translations it lies with the English language. We have so many words that are over descriptive and difficult for other cultures to understand that we get lost in translation. For example in Spanish there is one word for cup. In the English language we have cup, glass, bottle, mug, tumbler and probably a dozen or so others that I don’t know about. Our relationships in the US are based so much on written communication to impress and attract others to us (resumes, online dating, etc.) where other cultures relationships are based off of interactions and face time. This creates an epic level of confusion coming from us and going to them.