The Süddeutsche Zeitung reports that the translation system at webtranslate.de works very well:

(Original) Auch bei längeren Texten hat uns die Qualität der Übersetzung überrascht. Lediglich bei komplizierten Nebensatzkonstruktionen liegt das Übersetzungsportal nicht immer richtig. Der Anwender erhält dann lediglich eine Aneinanderreihung der Wörter und muss sich mühsam aus den verschiedenen Bedeutungen die richtige heraussuchen. Kurze, einfache Sätze wurden dagegen meist verständlich übersetzt, wenn auch nicht immer idiomatisch korrekt.

(webtranslate version) The quality of the translation has surprised us also at longer texts. The translation portal isn’t always correctly located merely for complicated subordinate clause constructions. The user gets then merely a stringing together of the words and must the right with difficulty find themselves from the different meanings. Short, simple sentences were usually translated against this understandably if also not always idiomatically correct. There are more sophisticated versions for sale.

Babelfish / Google translate produces this:

(Babelfish/Google translate) Even with longer texts the quality of the translation surprised us. Only with complicated subordinate clause constructions the translation portal does not lie always correctly. The user receives then only a lining up of the words and must laboriously from the different meanings the correct pick itself out. Short, simple sentences were usually understandably translated against it if also not always idiomatisch correct.

This was reported by muepe.de via Streitsache. The system is free of charge for 500-stroke texts (does the 500 include spaces?). There is also a word look-up feature.

The article emphasizes that webtranslate handles complex sentences well and has a good dictionary. The samples above show that Babelfish did not have idiomatisch in its dictionary. However, the results of the two programs are both OK, and Babelfish doesn’t have the 500-character limit.

We often make fun of machine translation. Of course machine translation is not bad – up to a point. For instance, it is useful for skimming texts in the Internet. It can be improved if its dictionary is enlarged or if, say, you define some terms as legal or economic and tell the program it is translating a legal or economic text – then it will translate Bank as bank, not bench (which will nearly always be right) and bar as Anwaltsstand, not Bar. Conversely, if you run a hotel and have your menu machine translated for your website, you are almost certain to fail. If you translate 2,000 menus, you may be able to automate the translation if you feed the right material in (it’s not easy to tell what is the right translation of a menu in a foreign language). But if you want to use MT in a firm, you will need to consider if it doesn’t cost you more to have for-publication or for-serious-understanding texts revised by human translators who would have been faster starting from scratch.

Sur Mesure is a French legal weblog by Helene Cohen (via iNews: Lex in the City), which reports:

bq. The aim is to give an insight for French and English insurers and other commercial entities into topical issues of English and French law (depending on which side of La Manche they are on) that might affect them.
Most of the articles are in French, though Helene tells me that she will be doing a short precis of each piece in English soon, as well.

The blog describes itself as ‘News and comment on the intersection of English and French law’.

Following my entry on civil-law notaries in Alabama, here is a picture kindly sent me by Bill Freeman (click to enlarge).

Civil-law notaries means notaries like the ones in Germany!

Here are the two links on the picture: William J. Freeman, Attorney, and Civil-Law Notary.

This is the Pegnitz, coming from Nuremberg, before it joins the Rednitz to form the Regnitz (which is why a friend of mine from Berlin refers to this area as Regnitz an der Pegnitz).

While pursuing some terminology online, I found some rather touching evidence of a seminar at the University of Saarbrücken where an English original of part of the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sales of Goods (CISG, UN-Abkommen zum internationalen Warenkauf) was carefully compared with an ‘official’ translation and a Babelfish translation:

bq. Artikel 15 (Englisches Original)
(1) An offer becomes effective when it reaches the offeree.
(2) An offer, even if it is irrevocable, may be withdrawn if the withdrawal reaches the offeree before or at the same time as the offer.

bq. Artikel 15 (Amtliche Übersetzung)
(1) Ein Angebot wird wirksam, sobald es dem Empfänger zugeht.
(2) Ein Angebot kann, selbst wenn es unwiderruflich ist, zurückgenommen werden, wenn die Rücknahmeerklärung dem Empfänger vor oder gleichzeitig mit dem Angebot zugeht.

bq. Artikel 15 (Babelfish-Übersetzung)
(1) wird ein Angebot wirkungsvoll, wenn es das offeree erreicht.
(2) kann ein Angebot, selbst wenn es unwiderruflich ist, entnommen werden, wenn die Zurücknahme das offeree vor erreicht, oder zur gleichen Zeit wie das Angebot.

The texts were carefully compared, following a neat scheme:
Teil A: Erkennen der Satzstrukturen
Teil B: Grammatik
Teil C: Wortschatz
Teil D: Rechtschreibung
Teil E: Zusammenfassung
Teil F: Kommentierte Link-Liste
Teil G: CISG Artikel 14-24 und deren Übersetzungen
Teil H: Anhang

But sometimes process isn’t enough.

bq. Darüberhinaus fällt auf, daß sich “Babelfish” umso schwerer mit der syntaktisch korrekten Übersetzung tut, je länger, komplizierter und verschachtelter die Sätze sind. Einfach aufgebaute Sätze werden in aller Regel wesentlich korrekter wiedergegeben als komplexere Satzgebilde.

Actually, I know how Babelfish feels. And there are a lot worse texts around than this one!

I had the feeling the inversion resulted from the numbers at the beginning of each subsection being mistaken for the first word in the sentence.

This seems to date from 1998, and I suspect people are less naive now. I do remember a lawyer doing something like this a few years ago: doing a machine translation and being rather disappointed.

Today is the fourth Sunday in Lent and so it is Mother’s Day or Mothering Sunday in Britain. I wasn’t aware of that, nor that in Germany and American Mother’s Day is on 8 May (and 29 May in France). I was surprised it was different from the USA, because my mother wouldn’t have it celebrated and said it was an American invention designed to increase sales of flowers and chocolates. It seems I was misled – the holiday was devised by an Appalachian ‘homemaker’ to improve health conditions in the home by addressing mothers.

Various sources fill in more: Wikipedia, the BBC and About.

It seems that Mothering Sunday may have been a day when British people were given a day off to go home to their mother churches. They would take presents for their mothers with them. It fell into disuse and was only really revised under American influence after WWII. About German Language reports:

During the First World War, Switzerland was one the first European countries to introduce Mother’s Day (in 1917). Germany’s first Muttertag observance took place in 1922, Austria’s in 1926 (or 1924, depending on the source). Muttertag was first declared an official German holiday in 1933 (the second Sunday in May) and took on a special significance as part of the Nazi motherhood cult under the Hitler regime. There was even a medal—das Mutterkreuz—in bronze, silver, and gold (eight or more Kinder!), awarded to mothers who produced children for the Vaterland. … After World War II the German holiday became a more unofficial one that took on the cards-and-flowers elements of the U.S. Mother’s Day. In Germany, if Mother’s Day happens to fall on Pfingstsonntag (Pentecost), the holiday is moved to the first Sunday in May.

This doesn’t mention that in East Germany, Mother’s Day coincided with International Women’s Day on 8 March.