LAS LENGUAS INGLESA Y ESPAÑOLA de Delfín Carbonell

The system of communication we call language is very complex and very arbitrary. Efforts to tame it, to break it in, are doomed to failure because language is a community effort, and every speaker, and writer, uses it according to personal, cultural, educational and stylistic idiosyncrasies. Dean Alford, The Queen’s English , put it like this: “Neither grammar nor rule governs the idiom of a people.” Several obstacles hinder translation software from being acceptable: Polysemy –multiple meanings of a word- is not yet understood by computer software. The ambiguities of meaning are still beyond any software in the market. “Vela” can both be a “candle” or a “sail”. “Quemaron las velas”, they burned the sails is translated as “candles burned.” Punctuation : This very important part of the written language presents almost an insurmountable obstacle for the machine translator: “Y gritando que no la mató, se fue” is nonsensically translated as: “And screaming that he killed he...

Beware of confusing computer translations Have you ever received a jumble of disconnected words and sentences in a message that defied unraveling? If so, it was probably the result of a computer-aided translation. If on a web site you read “translate this page”, cover your eyes, brace yourself, and expect the worst once you click on it because often you will not be able to make heads or tails of most of the “translation.” It will sound “weird” and “funny”, the result of a computer-aided translation. When you read the instructions or directions to a newly bought gadget from, say, China, you may end up throwing your hands up in despair at the confusing wording of the brochure, which is the result of machine translation. The now famous sign in a Japanese hotel: “You are invited to take advantage of the chambermaid” was probably the result of machine translation. Millions of words are...

Finally and at long last I have come to my senses.    After years expounding and arguing about the benefits of learning foreign languages I have come to realize the truth and seen the light: Learning languages is unproductive and a veritable waste of time. I intone the mea culpa and offer my apologies. And now I will write the rationale behind my about-face on the matter. Probably 95 percent of the world’s 7500 million people speak only one language. They seem to get by being mono-linguists and are happy as larks speaking only Swahili, Bambara, Tagalog, Italian, Bubi and other languages. Many of these one-language humans are successful at their callings, lead happy lives, have families, travel, eat at their hearts’ content, all oblivious to the fact that others speak differently. So what? If so many people can make it through life speaking only one language or dialect, why should we not be able to go it alone in a sea ...