Few people have the ability to speak multiple languages, a highly underrated life-skill. In the future, however, we might be able to get by, thanks to online translation tools (on cue: “there’s an app for that!”).
Ahead of United Nations’ International Translation Day (September 30) — which recognises the role translation plays in bringing people together and strengthening verbal communication — we tested if it is easy to translate English phrases (via text input) into Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam, and Hindi. While there’s a whole host of such apps, Google Translate, Hi Translate by Fun and Hi Tool, Hi Translator for iOS, and Microsoft Translator are the few that support close to six Indian languages — a lot of the others do not list any at all.
Tamil
How does the book title That Life’s Importance sound? Absurd, isn’t it? This is what Microsoft Translator’s Tamil translation of the book cover of J Krishnamurti’s Education and the Significance of Life reads like. It is a nice feature, but it doesn’t work to the T. It even got the author’s name wrong. This is no laughing matter, but what is, is Google Translate’s Voice feature.
When I asked in Tamil the direction to the nearest pharmacy, it said, ‘Make your way to the drug store’. Not joking. And it is best that I do not mention what it came up with when I asked for help with buses to the railway station. Long story short, don’t use Google’s Voice feature. Among Google Translate’s positive aspects is its Instant mode, in which you can simply point at English words with your camera and get them translated into Tamil. But the app doesn’t support Tamil to English.
Microsoft works reasonably better for English to Tamil if you key in the words, though. Hi Translate comes across as a breath of fresh air. There are no gimmicks. No fancy features. Just basic typing — simply type in Tamil or English and it works fuss-free. On one occasion, it translated ‘forest’ in Tamil to ‘wild’ in English. But other than that, it mostly got its Tamil spot on.
Ranking: Hi Translate, Google Translate, Microsoft Translator
(Akila Kannadasan)
Telugu
I found a Telugu copy of Robin Sharma’s The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari . Impressively, Google Translate could interpret the book’s title effortlessly. I proceeded to scan a brief news report in Telugu with PV Sindhu and Mary Kom’s picture, and the translated text was quickly ready without any errors. However, it struggles to translate when the font is not similar to its database. For instance, the app couldn’t translate a provision store’s signboard. While translating the phrases, however, we learnt, short and well-structured sentences deliver the best results. Google and Hi Translate tend to translate word-for-word. On two occasions, their results were exactly the same. Hi Translate’s aggressive word-for-word translation engine falters when an English sentence has more than six words. On the other hand, Google handles long sentences well, but the translations are very formal. Despite minor tense-errors on three occasions out of five, Microsoft’s output is more colloquial, often omitting a word.
Google’s voice translation is far from perfection In fact, it reminded me of how Google Translate was in the early 2000s: almost unusable. However, if you use simple sentences, it works well. Microsoft has a clever workaround to this problem with a robust phrasebook .
Ranking: Google Translate, Microsoft Translator and Hi Translate
(Archit Mehta, with inputs from Kishore Koyyalamudi)
Kannada
Three years ago, when I used Google Translate, the app gave me sentences that made no sense. Now, a lot has changed. I am surprised to see the app interchange sentences between English and Kannada with seemingly less effort and more accuracy. Similar is the case for Hi Translate, which is capable of precisely converting longer sentences with grammar in the right place. Though the apps seamlessly translate sentences, the extremely formal translations could make even a hardcore Kannada speaker go scurrying for a dictionary.
While in most of the cases the word-for-word translations work fine, at times it changes the meaning of the sentence. For instance, Google translated a board that read ‘Varsha Travels’ in Kannada to ‘Travel of the year’. (‘Varsha’ in Kannada means a year).
Google Translate does not support voice output in Kannada. However, it effortlessly translates Kannada sentences into English. The scan feature in Google Translate works like magic when the app is able to recognise the font. However, it struggles to translate hand-written sentences and gets them wrong most of the times.
Ranking: Google Translate, Hi Translate, (Microsoft Translator does not support Kannada translations)
(Aishwarya Upadhye)
Malayalam
Upon scanning a front-page sidebar on a Malayalam daily using Google Translate, I was surprised to see its accuracy and efficiency. But for some rough edges, the translation of the brief text was pretty much precise, though if you look for word-for-word comparison, a phrase or two was slightly off target. However, the overall picture was clear. I then tried to translate the blurb of a Malayalam version of RK Narayan’s The Man-Eater of Malgudi that packed in some dense usages in a single, long sentence. The translation read like a summary of the text, nevertheless meaningful, as if the app applied its own brain to weed out some elements for the sake of simplification. Larger texts, such as name boards, are unpredictable, perhaps due to unrecognisable fonts. And, Malayalam is not supported in the ‘instant’ scan feature in Google and the results of its ‘hand-writing’ feature were generally all over the place.
In terms of accuracy in interpretation, there were mixed responses. For one thing, some of the translations were quite formal, if not stilted, while both Google and Hi Translate often threw up similar results as if the same algorithm or intelligence were at work behind the scenes. While shorter sentences were impressive with their correctness, longer ones raised some question marks.
Google’s voice translation feature came across as a hit-or-miss affair, but largely usable with common sense. For instance, the word ‘fare’ (as in charges) in a test phrase from English to regional was misheard or misread or misinterpreted as ‘fire’ first and then still as ‘fair’ in successive attempts, processing the translation as ‘ mela ’ in Malayalam, thus completely distorting the semantics. Or a serious-sounding Malayalam word for ‘emergency’ replaced a more colloquial equivalent of ‘urgent’ Similar story for voice translation from Malayalam to English too.
Ranking: Google Translate, Hi Translate, (Microsoft Translator doesn’t yet support Malayalam translations)
(Harikumar JS)
Hindi
Hindi has its own little idiosyncrasies depending on where you use it — Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Delhi have obviously very different styles, and it doesn’t take too much effort to pick up on these variations. If, in Delhi, I say “ mahoday, kripya uchit kiraya vasoolein ,” instead of a variation of “ bhaisaab sahi batao, mazaak mat karo ” to an autorickshaw driver, I can kiss my hopes of getting a ride for a reasonable price goodbye. The problem with all three apps — Google Translate, Microsoft Translator, and Hi Translator for iOS — is that they gave more or less the same textbook-Hindi versions of most phrases I asked them to help me with. The text/photo-scan feature on Hi Translator is a pay-only feature, and Microsoft doesn’t offer one at all. But the Google photo-scan feature is nifty, except when there’s even a slight change in typeface. I tried to read a Priyadarshan book Naye Daur Ka Naya Cinema (Cinema of The New Era) published by Vani Prakashan.When I was pointing at the stylised text on the cover, it showed me garbled phrases like ‘New Mouthful Baa Sibema’. However, it worked seamlessly well with the plain typeface (only, it was a direct translation, which read ‘new era new cinema’). This will fail if you try to read a whole page through your phone camera, though.
Ranking: Hi Translator for iOS (for UI); Google Translate (for photo convenience), Microsoft Translator
(Vangmayi Parakala)
