I was trying to get a ”gotcha” out of Google Translate by translating a title I’d written in Swedish into English, but the only one who got got was the one and only me. The only issue I notice in the English title is the use of ”the” in front of ”mass use:” I wrote mass use in the context of a hypothetical, general sense, not as a fact or statement. In any case, this is about English being translated into other languages, and Google Translate is pretty robust. Original Swedish title: ”Påverkas språkutvecklingen mer positivt eller negativt av massanvändning av maskinöversatt text?”

On the whole, I have no problems with machine translations. If more people get to take part of something, then great. On-the-fly translations of websites work wonders. Many websites don’t have built-in translations - this one, for example - so it’s great that it’s an option. However, using it when you have the means to hire professional localizers makes me give you the side-eye. A human translation is always better than one done by a machine.

That said, I've been thinking about machine translations lately. When I started Forza Horizon 5, the language was set to Swedish. None of the previous Forza Horizon games had Swedish translations, so I thought ”alright, show me what you got.” I don’t usually play games in Swedish, mostly because games never get translated, but it also just feels strange to do so. Anyway, I was playing Forza. I was doing drifts. It usually said I was doing ”bra” or ”fantastiska” drifts or e-drifts. Drift works in Swedish, so I didn’t pay it no mind. I personally would’ve used a form of ”sladda” or ”slira” just to make it more Swedish, but I digress. The problem is that the most basic tier of drift, a regular ”Drift,” had been translated to "avvikelse." Avvikelse means deviation, which is the wrong word to use in this context. This got me thinking... are machine translations actively hurting languages?

Again, browsers having the ability to auto-translate websites is a godsend, but there it’s implied that it’s machine translated. You briefly see the site in its original language, before everything is translated to the language of your choosing. Whether it’s done automatically or not, you usually get a popup telling you the website’s been translated for you. In that sense, you know it’s not being displayed in its original language. I don't think Forza Horizon 5 discloses anywhere that the Swedish translation is machine translated, however. You see ”Swedish” as an option, you assume it’s like any typical translation: someone’s gone and rewrote everything to Swedish. But that isn’t the case, in this case.

I’ve been thinking about this, imagining someone new to Swedish playing it and learning the wrong words, definitions, meanings., and therefore a messed up initial understanding of the language. Swedish is also just one language, and a pretty niche one at that: around 10 million people speak it. This is apparently enough for it to be classified as a ”big language”, but it’s still only a fraction of English’s 1 billion, French’s 300 million, and not even 10% of German’s 130 million speakers. Searching about Horizon 5 localization online told me that even its German and French language options may've been machine translated. When even some of the most popular languages only get that, you gotta wonder...

Should machine translations have disclaimers saying they've not been translated by humans, at least when it's being translated by the product itself? I assume Horizon 5’s English translation is done by humans, but I’m talking languages that have been done entirely by a machine. It's one thing to decide to auto-translate websites by your own volition, it's another to be forced to deal with a machine translated text. Keep in mind, I'm way out of my wheelhouse about this topic, but as someone who speaks a somewhat niche language I've had to deal with lots of machine translations. It's one of the reasons I keep using things in English instead of Swedish, aside from the aformentioned lack of translations and it just feeling weird.

While I'm on the topic of translations, I started using Simply.com recently. So far so good, but their Swedish translation is total dogshit. Swedish, English, and Danish (or Norwegian) all mixed into one, incoherent language. It's so bad I don't even think it was translated by a machine!