[Multilingual Monday] The Google Translate Chronicles

[aadroma]

So I was in Bolingbrook for a Hallowe'en party, and I ran into, among other people, muckefuck, and of course we had to start talking about languages. Someone who was part of our conversation made reference to automatic machine translation. "Well I understand there are pretty good ones these days!" he said, and I could only laugh, especially given my

Comments

[bitterlawngnome]

I'm extremely impressed that Google now translates "süket lófasz" as "dumb fuck" rather than the more literal "deaf horse penis" it used to suggest.

[perlcub]

This made me laugh.

[muckefuck]

I daresay I'd be extremely impressed by a deaf horse penis as well!

[gorkabear]

In my former job, everybody wrote the documentation in Google-translated Spanish to English. The result was impossible to read. I sometimes had to translate back to Spanish, word by word, to get something that could ressemble an actual sentence. Add the fact that most people can't even write proper Spanish, so the errors were huge.

[muckefuck]

If anyone's interested in knowing more about that particular mistranslation, you can find the Language Log article which tracks it down to a widely-used programme produced by Guangdong-based Kingsoft here: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005195.html. In the first line you'll also find links to several earlier articles which discuss how ubiquitous the error is despite the fact that it's been fixed in later editions of the software.

[muckefuck]

The brute force approach typified by Google's translation algorithms has much to recommend it; it's clearly taken us closer to acceptable machine translations than decades of fooling around with parsers ever did. But it does have some bizarre unforeseen consequences.