Machine Translation Software Usability - Trustworthiness and Security

Trustworthiness and Security

An interesting peculiarity of Google Translate as of 24 January 2008 (corrected as of 25 January 2008) is the following result when translating from English to Spanish, which shows an embedded joke in the English-Spanish dictionary which has some added poignancy given recent events:

Heath Ledger is dead ==> Tom Cruise está muerto

This raises the issue of trustworthiness when relying on a machine translation system embedded in a Life-critical system in which the translation system has input to a Safety Critical Decision Making process. Conjointly it raises the issue of whether in a given use the software of the machine translation system is safe from hackers.

It is not known whether this feature of Google Translate was the result of a joke/hack or perhaps an unintended consequence of the use of a method such as statistical machine translation. Reporters from CNET Networks asked Google for an explanation on January 24, 2008; Google said only that it was an "internal issue with Google Translate". The mistranslation was the subject of much hilarity and speculation on the Internet.

If it is an unintended consequence of the use of a method such as statistical machine translation, and not a joke/hack, then this event is a demonstration of a potential source of critical unreliability in the statistical machine translation method.

In human translations, in particular on the part of interpreters, selectivity on the part of the translator in performing a translation is often commented on when one of the two parties being served by the interpreter knows both languages.

This leads to the issue of whether a particular translation could be considered verifiable. In this case, a converging round-trip translation would be a kind of verification.