Can I trust Google Translate? - Spanish

Can I trust Google Translate? My informal experiment (explained in last week's post) was to translate ten English travel phrases into Spanish, Portuguese and French in future posts and compare them to Google's translations.

This week's post is about Spanish, a language I feel fairly comfortable with, although I must admit it has been several years since I have spoken Spanish on a daily basis Here are my best guesses as to how I would translate the English travel phrases I listed last week.

First I had to decide if I was going to be travelling in Mexico or Spain because the vocabulary would be slightly different. I decided to imagine myself on a trip to Mexico (maybe to a resort in Cabo San Lucas in Baja California?) for this experiment.

My translations are the first ones in red, and Google Translate's are the second in blue. Differences in the two translations are underlined.

1. Where is the restroom, please?
¿Dónde están los servicios, por favor?
¿Dónde está el baño, por favor?
[Okay. I have trouble even in English deciding what to call that most necessary of rooms. In my house, it's a bathroom. When I am out in the world, it is a restroom. And in when I am in a fancy restaurant, I occasionally have the desire to call it the Ladies' Room. And then there's the toilet, the loo, the lavatory... ]


2. I have a (room) reservation for tonight.
Tengo reservación para esta noche.
Tengo una reserva (habitación) para esta noche.
[I probably should have used an indefinite article (una), the difference in the translation of 'reservation' is a regional difference, and Google didn't translate correctly when I put a word in parentheses.]


3.My name is Linda. What is your name?
Me llamo Linda. ¿Cómo se llama Ud.? (¿Cómo te llamas?)
Mi nombre es Linda. ¿Cuál es su nombre?
[Different ways to express the same thing. Both work for me. I included both formal and informal forms of address, which Google also provides in a drop down menu.]

4. When does the train leave/arrive?
¿Cuándo sale (llega) el tren?
¿Cuándo sale / llega el tren?
[Hallelujah! We agree!]

5. How much does it cost?
¿Cuánto cuesta?
¿Cuánto cuesta?
[No argument here.]

6.Pardon me.
Con permiso. Perdón.
Perdón.
[I agree with Google that perdón is the more general word. It can be used with both senses of asking permission and excusing oneself.]

7. Do you have a vegetarian dish?
¿Hay platos vegetarianos?
¿Tiene un plato vegetariano?
[No quibbling here. Both seem to work.]

8.May I have a glass of water please?
¿Me da un vaso de agua, por favor?
¿Puedo tener un vaso de agua por favor?
[Both work.]

9. I want to buy a ticket please.
Quiero comprar un boleto, por favor.
Quiero comprar un billete por favor.
[Regional vocabulary variation]

10.Where is the restaurant (bus station, train station, museum)?
¿Dónde queda el restaurante (estación de autobuses, estación de ferrocarril, museo)?
¿Dónde está el restaurante (estación de autobuses, estación de tren, museo)?
[One of the multiple meanings of 'quedar' is 'to be'. Both translations for 'train' work, but I like Google's better because I don't have to roll those r's!]


All in all, it looks like Google's translations into Spanish would communicate my travel needs. And isn't communication the goal here? Translations are often a source of intense controversy, so I would enjoy hearing comments, concerns, or complaints from readers. ¡Muchas gracias!

Can I trust Google Translate?

Last night, my husband Wayne and I watched a rerun of the movie "Midnight in Paris"  on TV.  It was even more enjoyable the second time around. 

Afterwards, I was bragging to Wayne that I had understood more of the French dialogue than before because I have been doing a free online course in French. "Okay," says Wayne, "so how do you say 'I want a glass of water' in French?"   Oops, he caught me.  I had forgotten that I need to learn practical words and phrases for our trip to Canada.

I decided then and there to write down ten of the most useful travel phrases for me personally and make sure I can say them in French, Portuguese and Spanish.  Those three languages, plus my native language, English, should take care of my travel needs for the next several years.  I knew I would need some help with the French.  Who should I turn to, but everyone's online friend Google Translate?

This was an embarrassing thought that gave me acute guilt feelings. I have spent years teaching foreign languages and threatening students with dire consequences if I caught them using Google Translate to do their homework. "Google Translate will get you in trouble.  It's not accurate," I warned haughtily.

So I am going to do the following experiment and share the results with you.  I will take the phrases listed below and attempt to put them in French, Portuguese, and Spanish.  If Google Translate does well with Portuguese and Spanish, languages that are more familiar to me, I will trust it to correct my amateur French translations. And I will put salt (or maybe a little New Mexico red chile powder) on my critical words concerning Google Translate and eat them if my findings exonerate that service.

My travel bookshelf

Here are my top ten useful travel phrases, in no particular order:

•  Where is the restroom, please?
•  I have a (room) reservation for tonight.
•  My name is Linda.  What is your name?
•  When does the train leave/arrive?
•  How much does it cost?
•  Pardon me.
•  Do you have a vegetarian dish?
•  May I have a glass of water please?
•  I want to buy a ticket please.
• Where is the restaurant (bus station, train station, museum)?

Are those the travel phrases that you would choose?  For next week's blog, I am going to translate them into Spanish and then check them against Google Translate.  Maybe you would like to do the same, and we can compare results.

How much French is enough French?

Celtic Colours Festival in Nova Scotia, Canada

With a trip to eastern Canada looming in several months, I feel it is my duty and obligation as a former language instructor (not to mention language lover) to work on my abilities in French.  You may have had the same dilemma with another foreign language that has a future in your life. 

The dilemma is the following: From a practical standpoint, just how much French should I try to learn or relearn in a few short months?  More specifically, which language skills should I concentrate on?  Shall I listen to lots of French conversations online to get some rudimentary listening knowledge?  It would be fun, after all, to eavesdrop on French conversations, on the street, in the hotel lobby or at the boulangerie (bakery) as I am trying to decide which lovely pastry to buy to go with my café au lait  (coffee with hot milk).  

Should I attempt to speak a few key phrases in French so that I can at very least greet, say goodbye, and thank a French-speaking Canadian?   Could I manage to utter Bonjour,  Au revoir , and Merci beaucoup? My neurosis about my strong American accent when speaking French is holding me up on this skill. I don't have a French speaker to practice with.  I'm too timid to enroll in one of the online language learning websites where you actually talk to French speakers with a program like Skype. ( I even get nervous using Skype in English, my native language.)  And what if, heaven forbid, I did manage to utter a French greeting with a reasonable accent, and the person addressed responded with a barrage of indistinguishable French sounds? I would probably turn tail and run.

Now the reading skill is another matter.  Such a wonderful skill for an introverted personality. I can already read French fairly well.  And given time and a bilingual dictionary, I can probably understand most non-technical material.  I imagine myself helping my husband make menu selections from an all-French menu (with a dictionary handy in my new smart phone).  And it would be a sneaky way to steer him to the healthier food choices.  

Now for the writing skill.  Will I be writing in French on our trip?  I doubt it.  And it's a shame, because writing is fairly accessible for practice.  The free online French course that I am slogging through right now (I'm on Lesson three of fifteen) has an exercise in which I listen to a sentence and write what I hear.  Then the program haughtily informs me if I have every word, accent mark, capital letter, and punctuation mark correct.  After a few tries, the program takes pity on me and gives me the correct written sentence.  It's like a little game, but how useful is it to me, I wonder? 

Then there is the matter of what words (vocabulary) to actually commit to memory.  For example, my French program wants me to learn many of the names of subjects taught at university; however, I don't think I will be chatting with many French-speaking university students.  The program also wants me to learn words like auberge de la jeunesse,  (youth hostel).   I may just do that to make sure we don't end up spending the night in one by mistake!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:La_maison_etre.jpg#filelinks

My last dilemma is how much to let myself be seduced by the finer points of French grammar.  As a person who believes that if your goal is to communicate in another language, using the language should take precedence over knowing grammar points, especially in the beginning stages.  But as a former Linguistics instructor with a love of Syntax, I can't help but be fascinated by two different French verbs used to form the passé composé,  each requiring a different form of the past participle.  Hmm.  I doubt if I will have many conversations in Canada about that!  

I think I have made my decision.  I'm going to concentrate on listening and reading (known as the receptive skills), practice a few key phrases to speak if I feel brave enough, and imagine where I may be using certain vocabulary words on the upcoming trip before I commit them to memory.  And I'll keep that thing about the past tense and past participles to myself.  I don't want people avoiding me in the club car on the train to Halifax!  

  

Isn't Everyone in El Paso Bilingual?

My husband Wayne and I both grew up in border towns.   Wayne is from Del Rio, Texas, and I am an El Pasoan. That shared cultural experience may have been one of the attractions we found in each other when we first met many years ago.

I have been interested in languages since I was a child.  My English-speaking cotton farmer father considered his command of Spanish something to show off and brag about.  We children were challenged around the dinner table to see who knew the Spanish word for a certain item.  My older brother and sister, more outgoing than I am, learned Spanish quickly from their playmates on the farm.  I developed an interest that made me an “A” student in Spanish class from sixth grade through high school and on through a Master’s degree in Spanish literature.

If anyone were to ask though, what language my husband and I speak at home, the answer would definitely be English.  But is it really?  Visitors to our home from other parts of the country often don’t understand us when we speak to each other because our English is peppered with Spanish expressions and pronunciations.

“Are you going to the grocería any time soon?” asks my husband hopefully as he searches in the pantry for a snack.  This, of course, is a play on words.  Many words in Spanish referring to a location where something is bought or produced end in ía, like papelería (store with paper supplies), panadería (bakery) , or taquería (a café with tacos as the specialty), just to name a few.  The joke is that the word grosería with the same pronunciation as our invented word grocería  means “a swear word.” Several years ago, a friend of ours made up a word based on the same principle when we were on a road trip through Mexico, saying that we needed to find him a peepeeyería as soon as possible in light of the large number of Mexican beers he had consumed!

Another of our favorite expressions comes from a situation that a friend of Wayne’s found himself in as he was trying to fast track a relationship with a lady he had just met in a bar.  As he described the course of events, he remarked that he had missed a good opportunity because the lady in question really seemed to be listo (ready).  Now, everyone knows that in Spanish, adjectives have to agree in gender with the nouns they describe, so a lady could never be listo. She would have to be lista, using the feminine form of the adjective. Wayne and I laughed about the story and started using listo as a shortcut for “I’m ready to leave the house now, are you?” with no attempt to match the adjective to the person.  Wayne even felt the urge to pluralize listo into listamos to ask if we were ready, on the theory that if verbs take the –amos ending for the “we” form (as in hablamos-we speak), why can’t adjectives do the same?

Trees and flowers are another area where knowing two languages gives the speaker a choice of words to use.  In our household, we tend to use the word that is shorter, more descriptive, or has pleasant associations.  The chinaberry tree in the back yard is seldom called by that name in our house.  It is the lila, which is easier to say and reminds us of the wonderful fragrance of its blossoms in early spring.  Ice plant is not as much fun to say as dedo, the Spanish word that also means”finger.”  The plant has fat fingers that spread out as a superb ground cover in our desert area.  The sweet acacia tree in the cactus garden is a huisache to us because Wayne’s mother always called it that, albeit with a Texas accent.  However, having several names for a plant is not always a good thing.  Several years ago, when I was on a native plant buying spree,  I paid more than I should have for a small plant with the exotic name of “Desert Spoon.” I discovered when I showed Wayne my purchase that it was just an ordinary sotol, of which we already had about twenty of various sizes on the property.  I planted it anyway.

Foods are yet another area where we use more Spanish than our friends from other parts of the world understand.  Naturally, there are all of the names for typical border dishes, such as enchiladas, tacos, chile con queso, guacamole, tortillas, tacos, salsa, quesadillas, and tostadas, which make up a large part of our diet.  But Wayne is as likely to ask me to serve him more tea “¿Más té, por favor?” or butter “¿mantequilla?” in Spanish as in English, perhaps to soften the blow of having to leave my rapidly cooling dinner to wait on him!

Is everyone in El Paso bilingual, then?  Probably, to some extent. But speakers exist on a continuum from monolingual Spanish speakers to monolingual English speakers.  I never know whether I should say the name of a street like Loma Verde with a Spanish or an English accent.  Sometimes I try to practice my Spanish in El Paso only to find that the person I am speaking to has the same idea about practicing their English.  We have a very odd conversation, each in a second language.

Wayne thinks of me as a walking dictionary for Spanish.  ”What’s the Spanish word for grommet?” he asks me innocently.  I don’t even know what a grommet is in English, much less in Spanish.  So bilingualism is more a process than a fait accompli in my life, but it certainly makes for some colorful conversations. I wish more El Pasoans would enjoy the two languages we have instead of wasting energy arguing about which one is best, or, heaven forbid, grammatically correct!

           

                  

¡Vamos a España!

"Do you have plans for fall of next year?" some good friends asked casually as we dined at a Chinese restaurant.  "Fall of 2014?  That's quite a ways away."  I answered.  "Well, how about joining us for a trip to Northern Spain?"  All I had to do was swallow my last bite of pork fried rice and glance at my husband for an okay before I responded "Great, let's do it."  And that's how our next travel (language) adventure began. 

I have always loved to travel, and I think I now know why.  It's not about adventure, because I am a conservative soul; it's not about fancy food and drink, because I don't drink and am always trying to diet; and it's not about meeting new people, because I am an introvert at heart.  But what travel does offer me is a great excuse to sit around and study other languages.  

Now I have the perfect reason to revive my Spanish.  It has lain dormant for quite a few years because I have been teaching undergraduate Portuguese language courses.  At one point in my life, the task was to take my Spanish and turn it into Portuguese.  I did that so successfully that now I still understand understand, read, and write Spanish fairly well, but when I try to speak, what emerges is Brazilian Portuguese.  Very embarrassing!  If the person I am speaking to is not familiar with Portuguese, they think I am speaking Spanish with a really strange accent.

/r/ 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Alveolar_trill.ogg

What has me most concerned is producing that trilled /r/ in Spanish. The sound is obligatory when a Spanish word is spelled with a double r.  When I was speaking Spanish on a regular basis, I could trill the /r/ at best 75% of the time.  Words like ferrocarril (railroad) I  tried to avoid altogether and instead substitute another word like tren.  I tried to never mention dogs (perros), although I am  a true animal lover, and I always used the more formal Spanish word coche for 'car' instead of carro, which is used in the Southwest.  I had to always be planning ahead to see what words with trilled /r/ sounds I could avoid.

One of the reasons I fell in love with the Portuguese language was because in most dialects of Brazilian Portuguese, that troublesome /r/ is not trilled.  It is made with a nice, easy sound, similar to a strong 'h' sound in English.  Ah, now that sound I can make.  When I visited Portugal, I heard the trilled /r/ again in European Portuguese, but I just ignored it and used my Brazilian dialect.  Problem solved!

All this kerfuffle over /r/ , you may be thinking at this point.  And you may be right.  After all, how important is perfect pronunciation if a person is communicating well anyway?  Some purists will insist that you must try to sound exactly like a native speaker of the language, but I believe that is an unreasonable goal for most language learners. 

Spanish subjunctive verbs don't scare me.  I can place double object pronouns in the right order and the right position.   Remembering which nouns are masculine and feminine holds no fear for me.  But oh that Spanish /r/!