I was wandering around altavista (for old time’s sake - AV was my favourite search engine before google came around) until it surprised me with it’s Chinese-to-English translation service. I was like, COOL!, I’ve always wanted to try out something like that. Even though I’m already bilingual, I would like to see how a computer would attempt to translate a language as complex as Chinese.

So I fed it with zaobao.

Well, what came out was at least readable (will comment on results later). I was like thinking, google couldn’t be too far behind, i mean, it’s google anyway. As expected, google has a similar service for Chinese-English, though it only support Chinese Simplified characters. Altavista’s Babelfish supports both Chinese Simplified and Traditional. Hence from here you can see Google’s China focus, excluding Macau, Hongkong and Taiwan (these places still using Traditional Chinese characters).

For a fair comparision, google language tools was also fed with zaobao.

And here are the reults:

It seems to me that altavista’s babelfish Chinese-English translation beats Google’s Language Tools.

Firstly, babelfish seems to have better grammar, it translates 即时新闻 into “Immediate news” rather than “Immediately news” by google.

More importantly, babelfish knows more famous Chinese people than google, so it tends to translate their names correctly. Google got 周杰伦 as “Week outstanding roentgen”, babelfish got that right as “Zhou Jielun”. And, Google totally missed North Korean N-Man’s name, mixing it up with gold” while babelfish prints it prettily as “Kim-Jong II”.

Contextual-wise, both are pretty readable. Babelfish makes less mistakes and has better grammar, aiding in understanding. As with any machine-translation service, you need a little imagination to help.

Both got wrong 美与伊拉克武装组织洽谈和平协议, but babelfish needs less guessing on the reader’s part with “America and Iraq arm organizes the discussion peace agreement”, google failed miserabely with “Beautifully arms with Iraq organizes the discussion peace agreement”. Correct translation being “Armerica and Iraqi Arms Groups Dicusses Peace Agreement”.

And both got “海指”, or the Straits Times Index, as “The Sea”. *laughs*

If you need a Chinese-English translation service, go for Altavista’s Babelfish. Google doesn’t always get everything right. :) Admittedly, Chinese isn’t an easy language to translate and it would be interesting how far machine translators will get it right.

Tip: Google Chinese understands Hanyu Pinyin. To search for “新加坡”, simply type “xin jia po”.