How And Why To Paraphrase Text By Using Back-Translation by Beatrice Beard

It can be a real chore having to paraphrase a block of text. Reading and paraphrasing text takes a good amount of time and often requires the help of a thesaurus to guide you through the changes.

There are lots of reasons that you might want to paraphrase text and it's becoming an increasingly important job as content development has become more and more important online. There are also more nefarious reasons (like wanting to take someone else's writing) but there are plenty of interesting reasons as to why you need to get the job done. 

Given that it's tedious doing it by hand, how can get it done more easily? Through back-translating. 

Let's take a look at how that works.

The Back Translating Process

The process of back translating involves Google's 'Translate' tool, traditionally used for giving translations into one of the over 100 languages that Google offers. "The process is a three-part one, that is very simple and only takes a matter of seconds initially and will speed up your paraphrasing job", explains Chloe Calhoun, writer at WriteMyx and BritStudent.

Step 1: Take whatever the piece of text is that you want to paraphrase and put it into Google Translate. Make sure that it isn’t too long. Google Translate has a 5000 character limit so make sure that your block of text fits in with that. 

Step 2: Translate the text into a foreign language. Ideally, choose one that is noticeably dissimilar to English. Try languages with non-Roman alphabets, or which are simply very different from English. I find that Korean, Irish and Russian are all quite effective languages.

Step 3: Translate the resulting foreign text back into English. The text you are left with will be similar to the original but have some noticeable differences between individual words and turns of phrase.

There you have it, a nice and convenient way to paraphrase text and come up with something similar but different. The work of only a few minutes.

Why Back-Translate Text?

There can be many different reasons that you might want to perform this process and everyone will have a particular desire for having back-translated paraphrased text.

Having the meaning preserved across lots of subtly different texts can be useful for data scientists who need large swathes of textual data to experiment on. This sort of 'multiplying' effect can be useful for lots of other areas as well but will depend on the individual.

“People do try and use back-translating as a method for plagiarizing work. A word of warning if this is you. If you are using it for anything where that is expressly discouraged, you will almost certainly get caught”, says Laura Park, lingua blogger at 1Day2Write and NextCoursework. It won't fool anyone who is on the lookout for it, so it is not recommended. Furthermore, plagiarizing, in general, isn't recommended. Just write it yourself, it shouldn't be too complex.

Another reason to back-translate is to compare translations and refine the meaning. The way that a back translation will take on synonyms and offer alternative turns of phrase is a really interesting way to look at improving and sharpening translation. You can back translate into different languages or the same language multiple times and you will keep landing on different versions of the same text. It gives you a new way to look at language and translation. You can also compare the translations given to the same piece of English text by different languages which can be useful for anyone involved in linguistics to make interesting judgements about the nature of the different languages that are being tested. This can be a really interesting process that can teach a lot.

Hopefully, this article will help you next time you need to paraphrase text for whatever reason that you might have. It's not in the least bit complicated and we should be grateful that such a useful tool is so readily available to us for our use.

Beatrice is a professional copywriter at OriginWritings and AcademicBrits specializing in academic literature. She is considered a wonderful resource in her work at PhdKingdom, where she advises beginner writers uncovering all the peculiarities of creating content that sells.

The Worst Translations In Business

Yesterday we talked about copywriters, and today we're looking at selling your products abroad with some of our favourite examples of translation.

Does anyone remember the cleaning product Jif? If you don't, thank god you have your youth. Everyone else probably remembers it as the old name of Cif. A team of highly-skilled marketers had a few too many coffees and decided that Spaniards, amongst others, were not to fond of trying to say the word. However, listeners were happy to no longer be covered in spit.

The once-famous Marathon bar (at least in the UK and Ireland) was renamed Snickers because the word was more globally recognisable. You can't always just rename your products to be international, so sometimes individual names are required for languages or regions.

Snickers or Marathon... who cares? It's delicious!

You have to consider regional differences. Coca-Cola famously introduced an advert into an Arabic-speaking region with no text, just icons of a sad face, some Coca-Cola, and then a happy face. Obviously, the intended message was that "Coca-Cola makes you happy". However, they didn't think about the fact that Arabic reads right to left, which left the ad being read as happy face, Coca-Cola, and sad face. The ad was a resounding failure.

Colloquialisms are fantastic stumbling blocks for marketers as well. "Nothing sucks like an Electrolux" wasn't the best tagline for the Swedish vacuum manufacturer to place in advertisements in the United States. General Motors' Nova never did well in Latin America either, due to sounding like "no va", as in "doesn't go" in Spanish.

Toyota failed with their MR2 in France since the name in French sounds similar to "merde", meaning shit. The car did poorly, but Toyota are probably more concerned about recalls at the moment.

In the 1960s, "Come alive with the Pepsi generation" was wrongly translated as "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave" for Chinese adverts. This was much to the delight of Coca-Cola... until they managed to name their product "Bite the wax tadpole" and "female horse stuffed with wax". They eventually worked on it and came up with "happiness in the mouth" after researching thousands of Chinese characters.

Is Pepsi okay? Uhm... maybe not.

With globalisation these errors are becoming less and less common as businesses become more aware of cultural differences. Nevertheless, sites like Engrish.com are a fine example that not everyone is paying for the professional assistant they require... and if they are, they're being ripped off!

If you're dining in a restaurant in Lisbon, Portugal, please try the "sawdust" as we'd love to know what it is! We didn't have the cojones to try it last time!

Before anyone complains, we know that some of these examples aren't necessarily true, but we bet you enjoyed them anyway! Many of them feature frequently in marketing textbooks so they're clearly of educational merit... we suppose.

Language In Business: Copywriting

Businessmen love money... who doesn't? It may be true that it doesn't bring happiness but we're always happier on payday than when we're counting our pennies at the supermarket.

This is what your time and effort is worth.

How do you get money? You could work. Work is quite simply doing something you don't want to do and being paid for it by someone so they don't have to do it themselves.

Maybe you had a killer idea and you created something that people will want. That's fantastic, but how do you get people to buy it?

You have to convince them. You're definitely not the first person to make something people want and probably not the first person to make the product you're hoping to sell. Perhaps you have one tool at your disposal that others have ignored: language. There's good money for those who can use their language (or languages) well, be it in the form of copywriting, translation or interpreting.

How important is good copy? A lot of small businesses will overlook a professional writer in order to save money... who could blame them, given the economy is thriving like worms in an aviary? The issue is that not everyone writes the same way, with the same message. A person who writes for their own business may leave out key information that their customers want to hear.

Who's going to write your copy... you? Dream on!

Many readers are put off and confused by pretentious language, complicated sentence structure and long-winded messages. Short and simple, right? The language needs to be prioritised to make sure the main selling points are clear and concise.

Then there's register (we talked about this a while ago, read the original post here). Are you communicating with your customers? Is the register appropriate to what you're selling? Would the Ritz have "Yo dude! Come to our totally awesome hotel!" on their brochure? Would a cheap and cheerful hostel need to read like Chaucer?

The words have to be picked carefully. Not every word has the same meaning for readers, just like awesome in the previous example. We doubt most people would think of the original meaning of the word rather than its contemporary usage.

Why is it "I'm lovin' it" and not "I'm enjoying it"? Think about the strength of the words and the message the company wants to convey. Whether it's crap meat or not, you'll likely be more inclined to buy a Big Mac rather than a Larger-Than-Usual Mac.