Pure nonsense ensues as Bing retweets get lost in translation

Frank Kane has been trying out Microsoft’s Bing device, which is installed on Twitter, and he has some advice: hold on to that dictionary. Mankind will have to wait a while longer for the golden age.

Ever since the Tower of Babel, humans have been searching for a solution to the language “problem”. If only we all spoke the same tongue, wouldn’t that put an end to war and hostilities, and usher in a golden age of mutual trust and cooperation where commerce would flourish and well-being increase?

The digital age, in which all operations are conducted at lightning speed, seemed to bring us to the threshold of just such a utopia. The power of computers would soon have us all talking the same tongue, or at least referring to a device which translated from one language to another more or less simultaneously.

Many of the biggest names in the digital world, like Google and Microsoft, market translation systems that claim to offer mankind this boon.

I’ve recently been trying out Microsoft’s Bing device, which is installed on Twitter, and I’ve got some advice: hold on to that dictionary. Mankind will have to wait a while longer for the golden age.

True, my sampling has been fairly limited. Only on Twitter, and only from Arabic to English.

But even so, Bingspeak throws up some huge howlers, and occasionally lapses into translation so garbled and outlandish as to be worthy of a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll.

Here are some that I’ve come across recently. Needless to say, “sic” should be understood throughout.

Often, the translation is dead straightforward: “Obama called on the United Nations to lift the embargo on Cuba” from the Twitter feed of UAEBarq, a news service. Plain as daylight.

Sometimes, the errors are just simple grammatical points or literals that barely obstruct understanding of the message. So this from a Saudi job site: “Come and made over 15,000 riyals per month. Start trading sooner”. Clumsy but pretty easy to grasp.

How about this from the Twitter feed of Emarat Al Youm, the Arabic-language daily: "With video. The largest plane landing in UAE bad weather conditions in Germany". Well OK, maybe not as The Bard would have expressed it, but you get the gist: clip of an A380 in a storm at Munich airport.

But the more you click on Bing, the wackier it gets. This is from the feed of the Sharjah police: “Thick along the streets and Madam, in addition to the city the brothers drivers take caution and speed”. Now that’s more difficult, but you can just about work out it is a fog warning.

Likewise, from the context of the feed from the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage, and the picture of an old town, you can safely conclude that “Shortcut to read past and glorious present and happy future, where you find her fun” is a weekend break recommendation in the kingdom. I think.

But it goes downhill from there. “Al Jazeera mubasher Arabic and international Khatib: women hit at Max and Arabs deeply immersed in myasthenia gravis” was one retweet.

It gets more random. “The island of blowatrz and eye of the Emirates the largest tourist destination in the world” says the tweet from UAEProject. Blowatrz? I want to go there.

Finally, we arrive in Jabberwocky land. This is a retweet from somebody in the media business, as rendered by Bing: “Leach mesh veiled!!! An abomination of satan’s work! Abatha revealing! Led Leicester on display! Minimum last time!”.

My favourite, however, remains the Bing attempt at a translation from a Dubai official website: “In the nuts”. That’s enough.

Follow The National's Business section on Twitter