Good news, if it can be said, for my fellow Malagasy citizens: Since 6th of December 2014, Google Translate has been allowing them to see almost any web page in their mother tongue in addition to 89 others. Many people, myself included, have been waiting for this moment that would have come sooner or later. First of all, I would like to address a big thanks to all people that have made this possible. Thanks to you, the Malagasy language is getting further integrated into the polyglot Web world. You’ve also given a chance to the 15 million monolinguals to have an approximate understanding of what other people have written using other languages are writing.
Before Google Translate
Before we’ve got Google translate to translate almost anything in our language, including curse words, several websites have helped us Malagasy and other language enthusiasts to write corpora in a proper way in our mother tongue: many of us have already heard about Freelang, tenymalagasy.org and so on. The only drawback of these website is that they do not work in a collaborative way: they are not «crowdsourced». Wikibolana is a Malagasy language crowdsourced dictionary, but I have been so far the one that has generated most of its content.
Is it really that good?
Well, let’s be honest: absolute accuracy has been the motto for no machine translation system ever. But for a brand new language on Google Translate, Malagasy is… quite good. Daring to translate a language with such an unusual syntax like Malagasy is already a huge challenge, a challenge worth to be accepted. At first sight, idiomatic sentences and expressions are fairly well handled. Still when it comes to very complex sentences, it is a mess: verbs are at the wrong place, which either gives the sentence a completely different meaning, or makes it look like an incomplete sentence. There are also some fails as the one in the screen shot below.
Let’s see an example of a translation of a paragraph of the article Madagascar in the English Wikipedia:
Original in English In 2012, the population of Madagascar was estimated at just over 22 million, 90 percent of whom live on less than two dollars per day. Malagasy and French are both official languages of the state. […] The island’s elephant birds, a family of endemic giant ratites, went extinct in 17th century or earlier, most probably due to human hunting of adult birds and poaching of their large eggs for food. Google-translated in Malagasy (as of December 2014) Tamin’ny 2012, ny mponina ao Madagasikara dia tombanana ho 22 tapitrisa mahery kely, 90 isan-jaton’ny izay [no] miaina amin’ny [vola] latsaky ny roa dolara isan’andro. Malagasy sy Frantsay dia samy fiteny ofisialy ao amin’ny fanjakana. […] Ny nosy vorona ny elefanta, ny fianakaviana ny fizahantany ratites goavana, dia efa lany tamingana tamin’ny taonjato faha-17, na teo aloha, indrindra noho ny olona angamba ny olon-dehibe ny fihazana sy ny vorona lehibe Fihazana ny atodiny ho sakafo.
The green-coloured sentences are syntactically correct without correction. The first one has required the red words in square brackets to sound correct. The third one hurt my brain: “The elephants are a bird island, the family of big tourists, have gone extinct in 17th century, or before, perhaps because of people, adults, hunting and adult birds who have their eggs hunted for food.” It hurt to understand, and also hurt to back-translate. Astonishingly making a round-trip translation has given a correct sentence in English, so please always have your translations checked human translators.
Efforts to be continued
One can take part to increase translation accuracy by translating articles by using the Google translator toolkit, or by using and correcting translations provided by Google translate itself.
Cut to the rest of the world, the markets of London, Paris, Tokyo or New York will go mad: the price of precious and rare raw materials is increasing, making the insecurity growing: you will likely to be killed for detaining on you precious items such as telephone, or golden artefacts (rings, necklaces…). In response to this, the government will increase the number of policemen operating in cities, but this has quite huge repercussion on the State’s budget, making national debt increase. Debt increase is not appreciated by the markets, and already very fragile States will be going to lack money to pay all their civil servants. To avoid this, taxes will be increased in order to have some funds to make the State and all its institution work… temporarily.
Tax increases are never appreciated, even more in economic crisis. In fragile countries (Spain, Greece, Portugal…), the situation will turn into civil war. As money got from taxes goes decreasing. As there is no money anymore to pay them, civil servants are fired, and become officially unemployed. Actually many people will do unreported employment. For the few people still working reportedly, dissatisfaction towards the government policy will grow, leading to more and more frequent and violent demonstrations. To be able to contain demonstrations, the police will become more and more violent, making demontrations become carnage and bloodshed. But due to markets holding governments by their balls tax will increase again and again. But without any effect as already more than 80% of people have at least one unreported work. This is a great loss for taxes, so these 80% will be stalked by the government, leading to civil war.