kochi: The much-awaited Google Translate’s Malayalam translation service was rolled out on Friday but the tool became a laughing stock on internet with hilarious translations.
A close scrutiny of the translations shows that the new tool is still at its nascent stage. Most of the times, Google translation failed to produce a good translation of the text.
Users celebrated ‘Google Translate Malayalam Troll Day’ with a hashtag #GTMT making fun of the translations.
A comparison of the Google translation with the Angla MT translation tool, a project under the Indian Language Technology Proliferation and Deployment Centre, shows that the Angla tool is much ahead in accuracy and the final output. But the government project, which is yet to gain public attention, still lacks Malayalam-to-English option.
The Google translation heavily relied on dictionary translations and community-based inputs. One cannot blame Google for translating Salt Mango Tree to Uppumavu, a dish; Pinarayi as CPM and Mammootty as Poovalan (a flirt), as the input was made by users themselves.
Recently, Google had launched crowd- sourcing and invited users from the translation community to provide inputs for their tool.
According to Anivar Joshina, a free software expert, “At this point it is not much usable as it fails to form or identify valid sentence structures and their meanings.
Lack of corpus seems to be the main issue behind the bizarre translations of Google translations,” he added.
“Malayalam with 38 million native speakers is a major language in India and one of the country’s six classical languages. It’s been one of the most-requested languages, so we are especially excited to add Malayalam support,” Google posted in its blog.
Experts in the field point out that the launch of a translation tool in Malayalam is a good initiative in the field of machine translation.
