Round-trip translation
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Round-trip translation or back-translation is the process of translating a word, phrase or text into another language, then translating the result at least once more without reference to the original text, until it ends up back in the language it started in. This often results in something substantially different from the original.
Round-trip translations can occur when the translator doesn't know that an original version in the target language exists, the original version is not available, or the foreign language version has become so commonplace that the original meaning is not important. It is also deliberately performed with machine translation and computer-assisted translation software to test for the preservation of meaning and the software's accuracy.
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Inaccuracies
In as much as translation between two distinct, living languages is never an exact science, the current state of computer translation tools makes this more evident. Small glitches in the translation can easily be exploited in repetition, becoming more pronounced as errors pass from one language to another. As one website explains it, "translation software is almost good enough to turn grammatically correct, slang-free text from one language into grammatically incorrect, barely readable approximations in another. But the software is not equipped for 10 consecutive translations of the same piece of text. The resulting half-English, half-foreign, and totally non sequitur response bears almost no resemblance to the original. Remember the old game of 'Telephone'? Something is lost, and sometimes something is gained."
Quality check
Comparison of a back-translation to the original text is sometimes used as a quality check on the original translation. But while useful as an approximate check, it is far from infallible. Humorously telling evidence for this was provided by Mark Twain when he issued his own back-translation of a French version of his famous short story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County"
History
Bible
Arriving at surprising results with machine translation is not a recent phenomenon, and may date back to the inception of the software in the 1950s and the 1960s. According to Werner R. Loewenstein's The Touchstone of Life, a language translation machine was experimented with for translating the Bible from English to Spanish. It apparently "did quite quite well until it got to Matthew 26:41: 'the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.' The translation read: 'el aguardiente es agradable pero la carne es insipida' (the liquor is nice but the meat is bland)." Competing versions of the story have surfaced as far back as 1990. In 2000, a reviewer of the same book mentions a English-Russian-English version he is aware of.
Supporters of Aramaic primacy—i.e., of the view that the Christian New Testament or its sources were originally written in the Aramaic language—seek to prove their case by showing that difficult passages in the existing Greek text of the New Testament make much better sense if back-translated into Aramaic—that, for example, some incomprehensible references are in fact Aramaic puns which do not work in Greek.
Till Eulenspiegel
When historians suspect that a document is actually a translation from another language, back-translation into that hypothetical original language can provide supporting evidence by showing that such characteristics as idioms, puns, peculiar grammatical structures, etc., are in fact derived from the original language.
For example, the known text of the Till Eulenspiegel folk tales is in High German but contains many puns which only work if back-translated into Low German. This seems clear evidence that these tales (or at least large portions of them) were originally composed in Low German and rendered into High German by an over-metaphrastic translator.
Mark Twain
Examples of round-trip translation are not limited to automatic translation tools. Mark Twain published a literal re-translation into English of a French translation of his 1865 short story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.
The Manuscript Found in Saragossa
In cases when a historic document survives only in translation, the original having been lost, researchers sometimes undertake back-translation in an effort to reconstruct the original text. An example involves the novel The Saragossa Manuscript by the Polish aristocrat Jan Potocki (1761–1815). The polymath polyglot composed the book entirely in French and published fragments anonymously in 1804 and 1813–14. Portions of the original French-language manuscripts were subsequently lost; the missing fragments survived, however, in a Polish translation that was made by Edmund Chojecki in 1847 from a complete French copy, now lost. French-language versions of the complete Saragossa Manuscript have since been produced, based on extant French-language fragments and on French-language versions that have been back-translated from Chojecki's Polish version.
Philip K. Dick
In Philip K. Dick's 1969 novel Galactic Pot Healer, a character passes the time at his boring job by playing a game involving round-trip translations and a world-wide computer network. A typical instance of the game involves one person translating an English book title into a different language (e.g. Japanese) and back. Then another person tries to guess the original title. It was a remarkably accurate description of games that can be played with online translation tools.
See also
