Is Google Translate the Next Great Dating App?
An East Village test drive shows it’s pretty good at following conversations, but even better at getting them started
I am not what you’d call an early adopter. Until last week, I stubbornly clung to my app-deprived BlackBerry—even though it meant that, unlike everyone I know, I have been unable to use Words With Friends, Instagram, Shazam, or, more recently, Tinder.
But last Thursday, upon learning that Google had unrolled a new app that could seize snatches of foreign conversation from the air and translate them in real time, out loud and in print (not to mention translating photographs of text), I rushed out and bought an iPhone.
Anyone at large abroad would now be able to have a romantic exchange, à la Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy
My irresistible impulse to test-drive the app was cellular in a non-technological sense: Every cell of my being craved it. As a translator and writer, I spend a good portion of my day thinking about what people say, and what they mean by it. I spent much of Thursday, for instance, agonizing over whether to render the French insult “goujat” as “cad” or “lout.” (I went with “lout”). The new app, I hoped, would liberate people like me from their dictionaries, and spare monolingual travelers much humiliation and confusion.
Anyone at large abroad would now be able to have a romantic exchange, à la Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, with the app playing the role of interpreter. It might even give me the courage, finally, to go to Brazil—which I’ve avoided thus far, mostly because all I can say in Portuguese is “moqueca.”
First, though, I resolved to break in this new technology in my East Village neighborhood. Lower Manhattan abounds in multinational restaurants and cafes — Bengali, Italian, Greek, Japanese, Israeli, Spanish, German, Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian, and so on—and the app can decode all the languages of those places, plus eighty more (including Yiddish, Yoruba, and Zulu).
At the Italian café Ballarò I received a friendly greeting from Barbara, the Trieste-born barista:
“Come stai?”
Could you say that into the speaker? I asked, showing her the nifty voice-capture icon on my phone.
“Come stai?” she repeated.
The phone’s reply was almost instantaneous.
“What’s up, Kyle?”
“Who is Kyle?” I inquired.
Barbara shrugged: “Non lo so. My son had one of these, they never work.”
While waiting for my latte I pulled out the novel I’d been reading, Justine Lévy’s “Rien de Grave.” I captured an image of the book’s title, which got translated as “Rien de tumba.” I blinked. That would have meant, more or less: “Nothing of the tomb,” a grim and sibylline mangling of French and Spanish. My mistake, I realized: I’d unwittingly entered the wrong origin and destination languages. After fiddling for a bit, I uncrossed the wires and the correct answer appeared: “Nothing serious.”
For lunch I stopped by one of my favorite biergartens. As the waitress hovered, looking at me skeptically (she knows I speak German) I spoke my English request into the phone.
“Could I please have a bratwurst without a bun, and some mushroom soup?”
In German the phrase came out:
“List please about a bunny and so excited mushroom soup.”
She sighed. “We don’t have mushroom soup.”
O.K. then, I said: “Could I have please have some Reiberdatschi?” (it’s one of their specialties, a lot like hash browns).
That came out, “Could I please have some rubber ducky?” (“Könnte ich bitte noch ein paar Gummiente?”)
That made the waitress laugh—but given that the name of the dish is German, I suppose it was a trick question.
On the way home, I stopped at my regular Polish hair salon, and elated the owner by showing her Polish text on my screen:
“Can I have an appointment next Tuesday?” it read, in her language.
Marysia responded into the microphone, in Polish:
“Sorry, Silvia is not working Tuesday.”
The written translation came back “Sylvia Tuesday a shampoo not working.”
But I hadn’t asked about a shampoo! It turns out that the Polish word for ‘sorry,’ przepraszam [pronounced shu-PRA-sham] sounds like shampoo—or at least, it does to Google.
(It was here that I learned one of the app’s key limitations: it writes and “hears” 90 languages, but only speaks seven — English, German, Russian, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.)
That afternoon, I had tea with a friend of Russian descent whose father once ran the interpretation service for the United Nations. In the 1970s, he told me, his father had worried that the introduction of a translating computer would signal the end of the department. His anxiety was alleviated when someone entered the phrase “Out of sight, out of mind,” to be translated into French. The result was “invisible idiot,” and the U.N. stuck with human interpreters. Curious to see how the iPhone would solve the problem forty years on, I spoke the phrase into the microphone and instantly received a perfectly elegant gloss in an impeccable accent: Loin des yeux, loin du coeur.
I had two more exchanges before dinner. Stopping into the Royal Bangladesh Restaurant, I showed the man at the door my request:
“When do you open for dinner?”
Peering at the beautiful Bengali script on the screen, he replied,
“It just says, ‘Open time is dinner.’”
That did not sound like a question, but he got the point.
“We are always open for dinner, 12 to 12!” he enthused. “Come back!”
But I was already heading for Mancora, a Peruvian corner café, where I burned to answer a question that had long haunted me.
“What does the beef heart appetizer taste like?” I asked the waiter.
He listened to the question emerge (correctly) in spoken Spanish, pondered, then replied.
“It tastes like beef.”
So, interpreters: Have no fear, there’s rien de grave to worry about. That’s especially true since the app has a hard time “hearing” language in a social (i.e. normally crowded) space. Later that night, at the Russian bar and restaurant Anyway Cafe, on East 2nd Street, I waved my magic iPhone in the air and captured the phrase:
“Что вы хотите выпить? Shto vy khotite vypit’?”
Which is one way of asking: “What do you want to drink?”
The app, however, had heard, “What is the epithet?”
Next I tried, “Two lychee martinis,” which came back as “Shtoby shtat’ dzhinnom” (“To become a genie”).
A second attempt produced “Do tebya, Entoni (“To reach you, Anthony”), which sounded tragic, and was pronounced with grave resignation by the Slavic Siri.
We never reached Anthony, but we did manage to order our drinks. A little later, the app translated “second round” as “ white paintings.” (To be fair, we were not speaking all that clearly at this point.)
the app can’t handle the Ghanaian language of Twi, so I couldn’t test my reliable conversation starter in that country: “I love goats, I hate sheep.”
Since my first expeditions last weekend, I’ve revisited the app many times and have decided it’s kind of wonderful. I dictated into it a scattering of phrases I’d memorized in countries whose languages I don’t know (Japan, Turkey, several Middle Eastern states), and was surprised to find the words I spoke were understood, and that they meant what I thought they did.
As I had feared, the phrase a Damascus cabbie taught me during a long-ago trip, which he said meant, “ I love the Syrian people,” turned out to mean, “I go for young Syrian guys.”And sadly, the app can’t handle the Ghanaian language of Twi, so I couldn’t test my reliable conversation starter in that country: “I love goats, I hate sheep.”
If you ask the app to translate text — by snapping a photograph of, say, a street sign or a menu—it nearly always gets it right, once you’ve identified the language you’re after. (The only minor drawback is that it can be hard to isolate the words you want to capture.)
It occurs to me that, while Google Translate is undeniably useful as a resource when there is no other way to communicate, it has a secondary value its inventors may not have considered. Entering random phrases and then taking them on a virtual world tour is a marvelous way to break the ice on a Tinder date, whether overseas or right here at home. At the very least, it will give you something to laugh at besides each other.
