Translating the Internet | By Emoata Oghenetega Ejodame
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| Illustration by Annette & Jodi. |
What was the last thing you read online? Was it an article you read for school? A blog post? An Instagram comment? Were they written in your first language? If they were, you probably didn’t think about whether you would be able to understand what you read. But if those words were not in your first language, would you have been able to translate them?
For some people, the answer to that question would be “Yes!”. Technology has made it so easy for us to understand other people from around the world. In seconds, you can have an entire web page translated to your preferred language, and consume all the knowledge you could ever want.
But not everyone shares this experience. Not everyone is able to translate words into their first language with ease.
And why is that?
The answer lies in two words: parallel corpus. Parallel corpus means any document that has one or more translations. Major organisations like the United Nations have documents like these that have been translated into different official languages.
Parallel Corpus
Parallel corpus is key when it comes to online translation. Machine translation technology can take these documents and figure out patterns and relationships between certain languages, which allows them to learn how to translate between these languages.
The thing is, a lot of languages don’t have any parallel corpus. The majority of the world’s languages, in fact. Among over 6,000 languages spoken around the world, only a few of them have a sufficient number of documents with multiple translations. Typically, languages with less economic and political power will have less parallel corpus. Besides that, a lot of languages do not even have any written documents at all.
For many people, this could lead to a very limited online experience. As vast as the internet is, it is also quite narrow, as most of the content online is written in a small handful of major languages such as English, French, Russian and Japanese. For people who do not speak any of the more popular languages, online translators are crucial. The lack of parallel corpus for a lot of languages means that translating and understanding most content online is impossible for many people. It also means that many people miss out on sharing their views online.
The Danger of Extinction
For languages without written documents, the lack of online translation isn’t the only threat they face. Currently, languages are becoming endangered and going extinct at an ever increasing rate. According to Ethnologue, about 42% of languages are endangered. These languages are spoken by very small communities and are not taught to their children. This is often done when there is a more dominant language with higher prestige within that area. For example, French is the most dominant language in France and because of that its other minority languages like the Breton language have become severely endangered. In such cases, it is often preferred for the children to learn the dominant language, as it may lead to better opportunities for them. Other factors such as war, natural disaster and globalisation also play a role in the endangering of languages.
Endangered languages can quickly become extinct languages that no longer have speakers. A good number of endangered languages do not have a written form. If these languages become extinct, they simply disappear without much of a trace.
Standing the Test of Time
As the world grows and changes, more languages will probably fade away and be wiped from our memories. Thousands of human experiences will be forever lost without any of us ever noticing—and that’s sad to think about. But it is also inevitable.
We may not be able to save all of the thousands of languages that are heading towards extinction. But we can do our best to preserve as many of them as we can—through recordings, books, social media and other written forms. Because it is by immortalising these languages that they will be able to stand the test of time. As technology evolves, we can get closer and closer to being able to translate more languages, and ultimately bring the world together.
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