‘My name is Jeannie and I am from Inukjuak’: Inuktitut translators try out Google Translate
This month, Inuktut became first Indigenous language in Canada to be added to platform
Suzie Napayok, left, owns and operates Tusaajiit Translations, an Inuktitut translation service. Jeannie Nayoumealuk, right, owns Apatakaa Translations, based out of Nunavik. Both say Google Translate’s new service is helpful for simple translations but not complicated tasks. (Photos courtesy of Suzie Napayok and Jeannie Nayoumealuk)
Legally, your hands might be tied — but run that phrase through Google Translate’s new Inuktut translation service, and you’d literally be saying your hands are ‘tied up.’
“It’s a machine,” Suzie Napayok laughed. “It doesn’t know any better.”
Napayok is the owner-operator of Tusaajiit Translations, an Inuktitut translation service.
She said she’s impressed with Google’s new tool that allows users to translate text, images, documents and webpages from Inuktut to English.
But while it’s good for single-word translations, Napayok said people shouldn’t rely on it for more complicated tasks.
Inuktut — a broad term encompassing different dialects of Inuit languages spoken across Canada, Greenland and Alaska — earlier this month became the first Indigenous language in Canada to be added to the platform.
Users can translate using both Inuktut writing systems — qaniujaaqpait (syllabics) and qaliujaaqpait (Roman alphabet).
“[Google Translate] won’t work if you need a report translated,” Napayok said in a phone interview.
“You don’t want anything complicated, and always have it double-checked.”
After testing out the service, she said it tends to overcomplicate some phrases and sentences. She also said users need to keep in mind “cluster words,” which appear as a sentence in English but can be expressed with a single word in Inuktitut.
“It’s not bad, I like it if you just want to learn a bit of Inuktitut on your own,” Napayok said.
“No matter what they invest, I feel pretty secure I will never really be out of a job,” she added with a chuckle.
Jeannie Nayoumealuk, who lives in Nunavik and owns Apatakaa Translations, agreed. She uses Inuktut translation services like Google Translate or Microsoft Translator when researching uncommon words or proofreading, and said they’re helpful for a quick translation.
“I know from my own experience using it that not every word is there yet, it’s new, but it’s amazing to see,” Nayoumealuk said.
She tried translating a simple sentence, “My name is Jeannie and I am from Inukjuak,” and Google Translate gave her a sentence that was readable but different from the way people in her community would say it.
“Both can be understood by any Inuk speaker, but it’s not in the Nunavik dialect,” Nayoumealuk said.
She said it would be interesting to see Google Translate eventually offer dialect-level translations, but she understands this advancement is fairly new.
Nayoumealuk said overall she is excited to see how Google Translate’s Inuktut function will develop over the next few years and looks forward to using it more.
It seems to do a better job translating from Inuktitut to English than English to Inuktitut.
That makes sense. Linguistically, it’s a case-nominative language, which means that word-forms in Inuktitut are based on the the context of their usage.
A single word in Inuktitut “Ottawamuivanga” ends up the correct translation for “I’m from Ottawa”.
With deep learning and large language modeling, the more these translators are used, they’ll get better.
Ottawamuivunga is actually, (not –MU-I–) in phonetics, it’s Ottawa-MI-U-(TA-U) vu-nga but some dialects will use Ottawamiuvunga (Labrador perhaps some in Nunavik) but it’s missing some usually included action words that I added in brackets.
many languages cannot do word for word translations, because of grammer rules of every language. So just be faithful to your own language. Also so many Inuit have two version names in pronouciations. It does not even hurt, it is just normal. Some Inuit have done name change in legal way to respect Inuktitut more.
Inuktitut has been subject to rapid change due to the effects of colonization.
Changes that Latin languages underwent over hundreds of years are impacting Inuktitut in a very concentrated manner.
English was once case nominative like inuktitut. As it displaced other languages, it shifted towards a less dialectical language.
Inuktitut faces challenges of both displacement and a dialectical shift towards greater standardization due to increased mobility and mass communication.
Embracing tools like online translation may have the counter intuitive effect of reducing displacement of inuktitut by other languages.
A significant challenges is the adoption of languages to reflect modern ideas like finances, math and other technical fields like law and medicine. As Inuit are better able to negotiate the world around them in inuktitut, the stronger it will remain as a language of daily life.