Ever heard of Godwin's law?
Anyway. "Under no scenario is Save the Queen ever used in the same
place as The
Soldier's Song. Not once", you claim. But we're not talking about "in
the same place". We are talking about "in a _similar_ place, _as the
google translator sees it_". Not as _you_ see it. And you must
remember the Google translator can and do misunderstand contexts
completely. There is tons of evidence of this.
I don't say no one is submitting bad translation suggestions. I'm
saying I see little evidence of "unusual" translations being used at
all. Go ahead, prove me wrong. Submit "Wooly Bully" as a translation
of the french "La Guerre des Moutons". It's a board game name,
gathered from a french board game site, boiteajeux.net. It's a
correct, non-literal translation, so it's not polluting the database.
Submit it a hundred times a day, if you want to. Ask all your friends
to submit it. I don't think we're going to see it - if it was that
easy to sneak farfetched (from the translator program's perspective)
translations into the database, we'd see a lot more phrases coming out
as "buy viagra".
Incidentally, the more well-known board game "Ticket to Ride" is
correctly, non-literally translated to "Zug um Zug" in German. Not
because anyone suggested it (I bet I'm one of extremely few people who
submit board game name suggestions to GT!) but because GT came to the
conclusion on its own, and got it right. If you enter the Norwegian
phrase "Hjelp, vi flyr", the literal English translation you would
expect is "Help, we are flying". But instead you get "Airplane".
That's the name of a certain bad 1980 comedy, which was published in
Norway as - you guessed it - "Hjelp, vi flyr". In most contexts, if a
Norwegian uses that phrase, he would be referring to the movie, so it
is in fact a good translation.
As you understand, it would be impossible to keep the translator up to
date with a huge list of film titles, board game titles, french
popular song titles, Christ's apostles, and all the other names that
get non-obvious translations. It _has_ to figure out all these things
automatically. With your national anthem, something went wrong in the
attempt. Since it got bits and pieces of the target language's
national anthem in it, it should not be hard to see roughly how.
This happens. This is what failed GT translations look like. And it's
nothing new. Bad translations can always offend people, bad machine
translations are no exception. But you would do well to remember: It's
a _machine_. It has no feelings or attitudes, so it's a pointless
thing to get offended at.
