I know there are some very zealous net warriors on this issue, whether
they are self-motivated or paid matters little to me right now... As
I've said before (in very similar posts to others with similar
issues), it's not for lack of crazy people in the world that I don't
believe someone is poisoning Google Translate. It's just that I don't
think it would work.
If I should try poisoning google translate, I wouldn't use the
"suggest a better translation" feature, at least. I'd publish large,
popular websites with high google ratings, with official-looking
translations into several languages for their spiders to pick up - and
then subtly (or not so subtly) introduce the desired errors in the
translations.
I'm almost certain Google's web-crawling spiders are examining things
for possible parallel texts, and that some of the more crazy
translations come from the spider getting it wrong, but I have yet to
see evidence of malicious sites targeted at GT.
On Jan 4, 9:28 am, AMR YEHIA wrote:
> Another thing, Israel is investing a lot in the media and posted
> contents on the internet, few years back the israeli defense force
> created a new unit to face and mess the posted contents on the
> internet that criticize Israel, they have special units for Facebook,
> Twitter and even chat rooms and forums (i am not sure about chat rooms
> and forums since i read about them in a local newspaper).
>
> On Jan 4, 4:34 pm, Harald Korneliussen wrote:
>
> > On Jan 4, 7:52 am, AMR YEHIA wrote:
>
> > > There are no grammatical rules here, I mean if you translate word by
> > > word you will get the right translation,
>
> > but the translator does not do that, and can not do that. Some
> > sentences have very non-obvious translations, and Google translate has
> > only statistics to figure out which.
>
> > The issue of people poisoning the translator by deliberately
> > submitting bad translations - we have talked a lot about that in here,
> > it usually comes up every time someone finds an offensive translation
> > (look at the recent discussion about the Irish national anthem for an
> > example!). In short, I don't believe it. For the first, I don't think
> > it's possible (I know of no case where I have convinced the translator
> > of a non-obvious translation, and I have tried a lot). For the second,
> > I think even the most fanatic pro-Israel net warriors have better
> > things to do with their time!
>
> > > I was wondering how does "contribute a better translation" option in
> > > Google translate work, and if it can be used to force this misleading
> > > translation?
>
> > Well, no one knows except Google, and they aren't saying anything. I
> > would guess a good reason to keep the exact working of the "contribute
> > a better translation" feature secret, would be to make life as hard as
> > possible for people wanting to poison the translator. Me, I'm not
> > convinced they even use the submitted translations at all - maybe they
> > just store them up for use when they have worked out how.
