Does Greece Have Money or Not? It Depends on the Translation!

Like you probably know, money has been a hot topic in the European politics lately. If someone has been wondering why Finland is so critical against lending more money to Greece without collaterals, here could be the reason.

The Greek prime minister Papandreou has said: “Υπάρχουν χρήματα”. Because I don’t understand Greek I used machine translation to find out what that means. First I translated it with Google Translate to English and found out that it means “there is money”.

According to Google Translate the situation in Greece is not totally hopeless. But just to double-check, I translated the Greek sentence to Finnish with Bing Translator. This time the outcome was less promising: The Finnish translation “ei ole rahaa” means “there is no money” in English.

Apparently Finnish politicians have been using Bing Translator because obviously lending money to someone who is broke is not wise, at least not without collaterals! Although it seems like it, probably these translations are not Google and Microsoft’s official statements about the financial situation in Greece. All this proofs is that there still are some weaknesses in automatic translation, translation quality estimation is important when using a machine translator and one should use machine translation correctly.