Dear Google
Most of us agree that Google translation is a good thing. Machine translation has often provided a quick solution to a translation problem at the level where a little is better than nothing at all. This is fine as long as one realises the inadequacies of machine translation and the fact that any machine-translated page can give a general idea of the content of the original as well as a total misconception of it to the ignoramus who is not attuned to such modern developments. Machine translation will improve, even though it may always be trusted to provide a good laugh along with the quick and dirty solution — so can many living and breathing human translators, after all.
However, there must be a way that your search engines can tell which web pages are the result of machine translation. Even the observant user will often be able to tell from e.g. the “\el\” segment in the URL of a page that has been machine-translated into Greek. Or the people who lay down the rules must establish a protocol, even, say, a symbol embedded in each web page, which will tell the search engines that this or that is a machine-translated page. And then the engines should give their users the option to exclude machine-translated pages from their searches.
If this option is not provided to us very soon, please be advised that, whenever I look for a Greek phrase and the brainless WorldLingo translation comes up at the top of the findings giving false temporary hope, followed by a multitude of other web pages that somehow all manage to have a completely wrong idea of my language, I, and, I’m sure, many other users, will be appealing to higher powers that fire and brimstone shall be rained upon you and the likes of WorldLingo. We are not asking for this idiocy to stop — but we must be given a choice.
A living and breathing human translator
Most of us agree that Google translation is a good thing. Machine translation has often provided a quick solution to a translation problem at the level where a little is better than nothing at all. This is fine as long as one realises the inadequacies of machine translation and the fact that any machine-translated page can give a general idea of the content of the original as well as a total misconception of it to the ignoramus who is not attuned to such modern developments. Machine translation will improve, even though it may always be trusted to provide a good laugh along with the quick and dirty solution — so can many living and breathing human translators, after all.
However, there must be a way that your search engines can tell which web pages are the result of machine translation. Even the observant user will often be able to tell from e.g. the “\el\” segment in the URL of a page that has been machine-translated into Greek. Or the people who lay down the rules must establish a protocol, even, say, a symbol embedded in each web page, which will tell the search engines that this or that is a machine-translated page. And then the engines should give their users the option to exclude machine-translated pages from their searches.
If this option is not provided to us very soon, please be advised that, whenever I look for a Greek phrase and the brainless WorldLingo translation comes up at the top of the findings giving false temporary hope, followed by a multitude of other web pages that somehow all manage to have a completely wrong idea of my language, I, and, I’m sure, many other users, will be appealing to higher powers that fire and brimstone shall be rained upon you and the likes of WorldLingo. We are not asking for this idiocy to stop — but we must be given a choice.
A living and breathing human translator