>Unfortunately people compare these to a collection of the best translators in the world.
I don't think that's really true. They're comparing them to the performance of a person who is a native speaker of both of the languages in question. That seems like a pretty reasonable comparison point, since it's basically the ceiling for performance on a translation task (leaving aside literary aspects of translation). If you know what the sentence in the source language means, and if you know the target language, then you can successfully translate. Translation isn't some kind of super difficult task that only specially trained translators can do well. Any human who speaks two languages fluently (which is not rare, looking at the world as a whole) can translate between them well.
> Any human who speaks two languages fluently (which is not rare, looking at the world as a whole) can translate between them well.
No, sadly, that's not the case. A bilingual person may create a passable translation, in that they can keep the main gist and that all the important words in the original text will appear in the translated text in some form, but that does not automatically make it a "well-translated" text. They are frequently contorted, using syntaxes that hardly appear in any natural sentences, and riddled with useless or wrong pronouns.
A good translation requires more skill than just knowing the two languages.
Right, but I don't think many people expect machine translation to do better than that. And I don't think the ability to do good translations is quite as rare among bilinguals as you're making out. Even kids tend to be pretty good at it according to some research: https://web.stanford.edu/~hakuta/www/research/publications/(...
> They are frequently contorted, using syntaxes that hardly appear in any natural sentences, and riddled with useless or wrong pronouns.
I find it hard to believe that this is the case if the translator is a native speaker of the target language. I mean, I might do a bad job of translating a Spanish text to English (because my Spanish sucks), but my translation isn't going to be bad English, it's just going to be inaccurate.
Consider yourself lucky, then. You are speaking English, with its thousands (if not millions) of competent translators translating everything remotely interesting from other languages. The bar for "good translation" is kept reasonably high for English.
As a Korean speaker, if I walk into a bookstore and pick up any book translated from English, and read a page or two, chances are that I will find at least one sentence where I can see what the original English expression must have been, because the translator chose a wrong Korean word which sticks out like a sore thumb. Like, using a word for "(economic/technological) development" to describe "advanced cancer". Or translating "it may seem excessive [to the reader] ..." into "we can consider it as excessive ..."
And yes, these translators don't think twice about making sentences that no native speaker would be caught speaking. Some even defends the practice by saying they are faithful to the European syntax of the original text! Gah.
> Like, using a word for "(economic/technological) development" to describe "advanced cancer"
That sounds like a mistake caused by the translator having a (relatively) poor knowledge of English. A bilingual English/Korean speaker wouldn't make that mistake. I mean, I don't know your linguistic background, but you clearly know enough English and Korean to know that that's a bad translation, and you presumably wouldn't have made the same mistake if you'd been translating the book.
>Some even defends the practice by saying they are faithful to the European syntax of the original text!
I think there's always a tension between making the translation faithful to the original text and making it idiomatic. That's partly a matter of taste, especially in literature.
> A bilingual English/Korean speaker wouldn't make that mistake.
Well, "bilingual" is not black and white. I think you have a point here, but considering that people who are paid to translate can't get these stuff right, the argument veers into the territory of "no true bilingual person".
Anyway, my pet theory is that it is surprisingly hard to translate from language A to B, even when you are reasonably good at both A and B. Our brain is wired to spontaneously generate sentences: given a situation, it effortlessly generates a sentence that perfectly matches it. Unfortunately, it is not trained at all for "Given this sentence in language A, re-create the same situation in your mind and generate a sentence in language B that conveys the same meaning." In a sense, it is like acting. Everybody can laugh on their own: to convincingly portray someone else laughing is quite another matter.
Not entirely, but it is definitely possible for someone to be a native speaker of two languages, and they wouldn't make those kinds of mistakes if they were.
>They're comparing them to the performance of a person who is a native speaker of both of the languages in question.
Which is synonymous with the best translators in the world. Those people are relatively few and far between honestly - I've traveled a lot and I'd argue that native bi-lingual people are quite rare.
Depends on which part of the world you're in. Have you been to the USA? English/Spanish bilingualism is pretty common there. And there are lots of places where it's completely unremarkable for children to grow up speaking two languages.
I don't think that's really true. They're comparing them to the performance of a person who is a native speaker of both of the languages in question. That seems like a pretty reasonable comparison point, since it's basically the ceiling for performance on a translation task (leaving aside literary aspects of translation). If you know what the sentence in the source language means, and if you know the target language, then you can successfully translate. Translation isn't some kind of super difficult task that only specially trained translators can do well. Any human who speaks two languages fluently (which is not rare, looking at the world as a whole) can translate between them well.