Google Translate Beat Poems + Lucky Wedding Days

We owe a lot to technology. We are currently a quarter of the way through the 21st century — that’s a quarter of the way towards the 22nd century, just to put it in terrifying context — and innovation upon innovation keeps happening, with no sign of stopping. One example of this that I personally hadn’t really taken much notice of until being on this trip is the translation technology freely available. Although there must be many apps and sites that can offer slight variations upon the same theme, we mainly use Google Translate. The feature that has struck me most being that you can hold down the microphone icon and speak the message into the app, and it will then translate it into the language of your choice, and hey! You can quickly flip the languages around and encourage your conversational partner to do the same thing. Amazing! When you stop to think about it, the next step would surely be some earbuds that translate languages in real time, and that technology can’t be more than a decade away. Which further suggests major philosophical ramifications to do with the sudden erosion of language with Big Tech turning everything into digitised binary 1s-and-0s, and will that erase hundreds of thousands of years of language-based communication — or will it rather be a huge leap forward for human cooperation and basic understanding?

Or, we could just laugh at Google Translate’s balls-ups.

Tech Hiccups

Of course, with such technology there are alway hiccups. Blame AI shortcomings, blame the limits of the current tech being able to understand not just accent, but idioms, dialects, colloquialisms, but even with such innovation inevitably there are times when both parties are stood there, one holding a smartphone between them, and both not having a bloody clue what each other are trying to say — just like when our parents would try and navigate around France or Spain, with only a battered and outdated phrase book for help.

Vietnamese Beat Poetry

Below are a couple of screenshots of the most memorable examples of these; times when I’ve encouraged a local person I’ve been trying to communicate with to speak into the app (a task of understanding within itself, particularly if the local person is of a certain age or above…). The results are not only baffling, but so incomprehensible as to become some sort of Vietnamese beat poems. Best read in a dark smoky underground bar, with some smooth jazz happening on a small circular stage mere feet away…

Lucky Wedding Day

There’s been a lot of weddings occurring over the last weekend.

In Vietnamese culture, certain dates are viewed as ‘lucky’ or ‘blessed’ for weddings — based on astrology, the birth dates of the couple and lunar calendars. And apparently last weekend (the first weekend of January) was considered a very lucky one for quite a few couples in Hoi An. In our local area, which is very residential, barely a street would be without a marquee, tables and chairs, and of course, really terrible karaoke performed at ear-splitting decibel levels.

The size of the weddings varied, of course, from a ‘small’ street celebration with a marquee that still completely blocked the road for any through-traffic, all the way to a monstrous and beautifully decorated marquee in the middle of a large square stretch of tarmac, complete with much fake grass, a red-and-white patterned carpet stretching the entire length, battery-powered candles and incredibly detailed flower arrangements — all within a few feet of a very busy highway. This particular one was actually housing two weddings for two lucky couples, displayed as portraits on stands symmetrically facing each other on the entrance. Such large social affairs with fair-to-good chances of calamitous errors put me in mind of a few years ago, when I was very nearly late to a family member’s funeral after having to quickly find  a last-minute car-parking space. After milling around outside for a few minutes with the other mourners, it gradually became apparent that I did not recognise a single one of them — and only then did it dawn on me that this particular crematorium clearly hosted more than one service at a time. I’ve never before run at a funeral, and I hope never to do so again.

But to each and every couple that tied the knot over the last weekend — despite the road closures that prickled a very British part of me — we say chúc may mắn!