Man vs. Technology – who wins the Translation game?
The help of machines is invaluable in medicine, manufacture, transport, information exchange etc. One could think they are capable of anything. Well, almost anything. In times when men might think they are helpless without technology, there still are some fields in which technology will probably never be able to replace the human brain. One of these is translation.
Yes, machine translation has gone through an amazing development in the recent years, but there still are texts who would sound like a complete gibberish when translated automatically. While there is progress in terminology, machines still can't handle literary texts like poems, novels etc. And it's not just that — every language has its specific words which can only be translated descriptively. Here are only a few examples to that: cafuné (Brazilian Portuguese), meaning 'the act of tenderly running one's fingers through someone's hair'; wabi-sabi (Japanese - 侘寂), meaning a whole concept of 'a way of living that focuses on finding beauty within the imperfections of life and accepting peacefully the natural cycle of growth and decay'; schadenfreude (German), meaning 'the feeling of pleasure of somebody else's misfortune'; and many others.
And while the world is said to be globalizing, language will probably be the last thing that separates people. That is why translations will keep playing vital role as a mean for communication.
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