Webupon

A few years ago, I was eating dinner while on a tour to China. There were four Americans in the group along with more than 40 people from other countries. For my benefit, and the others from my homeland, the diner conversation was conducted almost exclusively in English. I was thoroughly embarrassed. The folks from Brazil, Japan and Italy were fluent in my native tongue and I only knew a few words in theirs. When I mentioned this to the young Italian across the table, he smiled and told me a “joke” that I will never forget.

Q: What do you call someone that can speak two languages?

A: Bilingual

Q: What do you call someone that can speak three languages?

A: Trilingual

Q: What do you call someone that can only speak one language?

A: An American

While technically the answer is monolingual, it is true that most inhabitants of the US, including yours truly, are only fluent in a single tongue. Since a large number of Internet users come from this land of purple mountains and foamy seas, I have naturally assumed that the Net’s touted ubiquity was little more than hype. While in theory, I can send e-mail to or visit the Web sites of peoples from around the globe, if we do not share a common language, what’s the point?

What good is ubiquity without understanding?

Enter Babel Fish (http://babelfish.yahoo.com/), the online translator from Yahoo!. While the technology still has A LONG WAY TO GO, the possibilities border on the Biblical. The service named after the famous tower found in the book of Geneses alludes to a time when the Bible says “the whole world had one language.” With online translation similar to Star Trek’s universal translator every person on earth could communicate with every other person no matter the place they were born or the language they spoke. There would be no language barriers.

While Babel Fish does not pretend to be a universal translator, according to the instructions, the software will translate to and from English and 12 other languages. It sounds too good to be true. Alas it is! The current incarnation of Babel Fish closely resembles God’s reaction to the tower – He confused the language of the whole world!

I imagine that there are worthwhile applications for the current system, but I have not found one. My first translation attempt was an effort to reproduce the demand of the Chihuahua in the old Taco Bell commercials, “I want some Taco Bell.” Babel Fish’s results were even more bizarre than the commercials. Try it for yourself and you will see what I mean.

In another experiment, a friend of mine translated “If you spot a spot on Spot, can you can it and put it in another spot?” (an important phrase to learn before your next visit to Tijuana) into Spanish. She then had Babel Fish re-translated the Spanish back to English, and got “If you stain a point o’clock, can you you can and she puts it in another point?”

After a number of comical translations, Babel Fish began to remind me of an old Navy pal. While stationed in the Philippines, he wanted to learn the local language and asked a coworker to tutor him. My friend was especially interested in learning phases that would help him with the ladies. However, the tutor did not teach my friend the phases he wanted. Instead, he taught him to say, “Kick me.”

That night, my friend repeated his new phase to every woman he met. Many only laughed, but most obeyed his request. Which brings me back to Babel Fish. I have a feeling that, if you used Babel Fish for important correspondence, you will look silly, get a swift kick in the pants, or worse.