The Accuracy Of The Translations

I think one of the first questions I should answer with respect to the translations is: “How much can you trust the accuracy of them.” I have developed my translation skills over a period of about 15 years and consider myself and expert in the field. Putting captions to each of the recordings was a massive undertaking. I completed many of them after Victor died. Some were long and extremely complex. In 2009, Maylor came and I starting translating of all his videos. Many of the videos and audio files went through several phases of translations which resulted in some of them having more than one version.

I relate the complexity of what budgies are saying to that of Egyptian Hieroglyphic writings. It took many years of studying the Rosetta Stone and other examples of ancient Egyptian writing by Jean-François Champollion before they were deciphered in 1822. By working out what some hieroglyphs stood for, he could make educated guesses about what the other hieroglyphs stood for. Since then we have learned what the ancient Egyptian culture believed and how they were highly connected to the spiritual and metaphysical world.

So deciphering what the budgies are saying is very similar. When I started, I could only understand a small portion of what budgies were saying in real time. I only began to understand them more after many of hours of listening and translating the recordings. Often I would get a phrase or two that would demonstrate Victor was talking intelligently about things that I had not taught him, but it was difficult getting it all. Sometimes there would be a few words that were very hard to understand, so I would have to more or less fill in the blanks, and see how closely I could match the sounds to what the possibilities could be. This is also the similar to the way that scientists have translated many of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Much of the paper that they were written on was deteriorated or missing so they had to make assumptions based on what the remainder of the parchments said. Similar, with the budgie recordings, there are many phrases and words that are faint or difficult to understand, and some needed hours of work to get a half decent translation. The speech patterns of the budgies were unpredictable for a number of reasons, some of which are as follows:

1. Much of the information that was being passed on by Victor and later the other budgies, contained verbalizations that they themselves had never spoken before. So in actuality, what they speak in context would be much clearer if they practiced saying it over and over again like they do when they mimic.
2. The recordings were not acquired with the best recording equipment. I had the cheapest computer microphone available when I began recording him. Even when I switched to a video camera, the microphone on the camera was build in and not as clear as it could have been.
3. Most of the videos were reformatted into several different types of media file formats in order for me to put captions to them and get them up on the internet. So there are spots where there is some corruption in the recordings due to conversion.
4. The speed at which the budgies can speak, (especially Victor) was phenomenally fast. Many of his recordings had to be slowed down just to catch all that he was saying; otherwise it would go by so fast you would hardly hear it.
5.  It was also evident that Victor and other budgies will throw in mimicry as a way of practicing their speech and then immediately break into a train of thought which would often come out in context as they were thinking it.
6. Lastly, my skills improved as the years went on and I was beginning to understand more all the time. Eventually it allowed me to connect and channel the same source the budgies were using.

All in all I would confidently say that the accuracy of the recordings range from about 80 - 95%. The other 5 - 20% cannot be determined because of the way certain words were pronounced or because of the clarity of them. The accuracy also depends on when the translation was first done. Obviously, the translations I did early on would be less accurate then the ones I did later as I often do multiple revisions of translations. In addition, some of the recordings of Victor are much more complex than others and still require some work.