The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra put on an excellent concert performance of Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) last week. Soprano Melody Moore brought the house down with her powerful singing and her spirited characterization of Senta.
Speaking as someone with a degree in Complaining About Wagner, I must admit I really like this opera. It’s probably my favorite Wagner opera — and yes, I know that means I’ll never win the Wagner Snob of the Year award, but that’s OK. Superfans who attain enlightenment by boring themselves to death at Tristan und Isolde or Parsifal are welcome to it.
One line jumped out at me from the spinning scene (go to 46:00 if it doesn’t take you straight there):
Mary, who’s trying to keep the girls on task, says to Senta:
Du böses Kind! Wenn du nicht spinnst,
vom Schatz du kein Geschenk gewinnst.
(You naughty girl, if you don’t spin,
you’ll get no gift from your sweetheart. )
It’s mildly amusing because in modern colloquial German, if someone “spins” it means they’re crazy. Du spinnst = you spin = you’re nuts! (Whereas in Wagner’s time a crazy person was “toll” but nowadays that would mean they’re cool.)
I wondered how the best free machine translator, namely DeepL, would handle this. Behold:
If you’re not crazy, from the treasure you don’t win a gift.
And Google Translate says: If you are not crazy, from the treasure you win no gift. (wrong and awkward)
This is a reasonable error for MT to make because it’s entirely possible that every single time it’s encountered “du spinnst” in a text, “you’re crazy” has been the correct translation. But it’s still wrong. I tried giving it some more context in case it had been programmed to recognize names from classic literature:
MARY (to Senta): You evil child! If you are not crazy, from the treasure you don’t win a gift.
No luck. You’ve probably also noticed the other big error here: “Schatz” does mean “treasure” but in this context it means “sweetheart.” In a similar vein, DeepL translates “I love my sweetie pie” as “Ich liebe meinen süßen Kuchen” (with “süße Torte” and “süße Pastete” as equally clueless alternatives).
It’s interesting to consider how much effort you, as a human, have to expend to understand what is going on in this scene and determine what the correct translation of “du spinnst” would be — practically none. Whereas the best MT, despite its speed, has no idea what a spinning wheel is, no concept of how and why words acquire new meanings over time, and no ability to think, “Is this a proverb? Is it from a fairy tale? An opera? I’d better check.”
And actually, you might come out of The Flying Dutchman thinking Senta’s a little crazy. But DeepL doesn’t think at all.
This is more proof that MT will only be able to translate like a human if it becomes human. Which it won’t (I hope).
I was talking to one of my Spanish-speaking diabetic patients the other day about how she had managed to get her blood sugar under control. She attributed the improvement to a substance she was adding to her food. I didn’t understand the word for it, and couldn’t figure out from her description what it was other than some kind of spice. She took out her phone and called up Google translate and I was presented with… SWEET NAILS. Delicious and lowers your blood sugar.
It must be a kind of clove! The word for clove is the same as for a nail that you hammer.
Yes, the confusion was cleared up when she showed me a picture. Cloves do look like old-fashioned nails. Just for fun, today I typed “sweet nails” into Google Translate and asked it to translate into Spanish and I got “unas dulces”. Super yucky!
That’s a great example of how MT is not really thinking about anything.
Uñas dulces are what you get from eating glazed donuts. So they’re a cause of diabetes, not a cure 😉