By now you must have heard that Google Talk now includes translation bots you can invite into a conversation. When you invite any of these bots, they translate whatever you type from your language into the target language. A very brilliant idea with a perfect implementation mechanism, but does it work? Let's find out.

I've mentioned before that I am an Arabic speaker. Given that Arabic sports one of the most convoluted grammars on Earth, I thought what better way to test the bots by having a solo chat with the en2ar bot. That is, I write in English and watch its Arabic responses. The results are below:

Arabic speakers among you will spot many mistakes but the ideas are still mostly translated well. With basic phrases, the translation is flawless in most cases. With more convoluted writing, the translation breaks down. You can see two comments relating a bad translation. The first one said "This translation sucks" which colloquially in English, that means it's bad. The translation used the meaning of "suck" literally, i.e., something you'd do to straw and some juice. The next phrase saying "This is a bad translation" was translated, well, badly, but the idea was still conveyed. The translation in Arabic actually says "This is the bad of translation". This grammatical structure is used in Arabic to emphasize the pinnacle of something (i.e. exemplary in its class), so in this case, the Arabic actually means "This is the worst of translation".

So all in all a useful feature but I don't see it being used for anything important like a business chat: the mistakes are simply too frequent for this to be used to convey complex ideas. It is machine translation after all and the state of the art is still bad.