Translation Examples: closely related languages

Authomatic translators have many advantages, but sometimes, theu may not be the best choice to make a grammatically syntactically correct translation. As an exaple of this can be mentioned the followings.

1. Agreement errors: If we translate a text from Wikipedia (Catalonian-Spanish), we can find errors like this: «La torre de Babel fue, según la Bíblia^[1], un gran proyecto de los hombres para construir una ciudad en vertical en Babel, la tierra de xinar que emprendieron a los hombres después del gran diluvio universal». The sentence is incorrect. It should be (…) «que emprendieron los hombres».
2. Spelling errors: in the sentence «Babel viene de la palabra Accadi Bb-ili (La puerta de Dios), donde|dónde Bb quiere decir puerta y il dios» we can see that the authomatic translator is not able to make a difference between donde and dónde. In plus, we must consider that this punctuation mistake can change completely the sense of the sentence.
3. Grammar errors: «Estos hombres eran pues, los descendientes de Noè y representaban la humanidad hablando de una única lengua» shows a very clear example of the differences between these two languages. In Spanish, hablando de refers to the topic someone has been talking about. If we ant to specify something, we do not put a preposition.
4. Vocabulary errors: «Como el corazón|coro de los hombres era desobediente y malvado, y en vez de adorar a Dios se preocupaban sólo por ellos mismos, Dios, con el fin de frustar este proyecto, multiplicó el número de (…)». In this case, there is a severe vocabulary mistake. In Spanish, the expression «frustrar un proyecto» does not exist. The tranbslator should consider other meanings of the word.
5. Punctuation errors: «multiplicó el número de lenguas porque así no se podrían comprender entre ellos y por lo tanto, no tener que detener la construcción de la ciudad». This sentence has a punctuation mistake. Adverbs like «por lo tanto» must be placed between two commas.

As we can see, an authomatic translator machine can be quite useful in some occasions, but we can not trust them if we want to have a completely correct and proper translation. We must not forget that each language has its characteristics, no matter how similar they are, as happens in the case of Spanish and Catalonian.

Sources:

• Torre de Babel (Catalá). (2008). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved: 13:51, April 21, from http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torre_de_Babel
• Torre de Babel (Español). (2008). Comprendum Translator. Retrieved: 13:57, April 21, from http://www.translendium.net:8080/home/url.do;jsessionid=CAA572C7E1E362D3E3D2952A2113BCC7
• Torre de Babel (Catalá). (2008). Comprendum Translator. Retrieved: 21:57, April 21, from  http://www.translendium.net:8080/home/