JAN LOVES APPLES AND PIET OF PEARS
IN OUR LINE OF WORK, CONFUSION CAN BE HAZARDOUS These errors can lead to confusion. And in our line of work, confusion can be a dangerous thing. If instructions are misinterpreted because of unintentional language errors, incidents or even accidents might occur. Given the fact that most of us have not grown up bilingually but rather have learned English at a later age, we will not be as proficient as a native speaker. Therefore, always beware of potential misinterpretation!
MICROSOFT AND GOOGLE REAL TIME SPEECH TRANSLATION Recently, Dutch tv news reported on Microsoft and Google developing software for real time speech translation. However, these software programmes still have flaws. For instance, translation of the Dutch sentence: “Jan houdt van appels en Piet van peren” results in “Jan loves apples and Piet of pears”. A telling example of the grammatical differences between two languages and the translation problems this implies. Still, this kind of software will help enormously once perfected. Hopefully this will happen in the near future. Until then, we do the best we can!
Thera Idema
25