The reason is that Google Translate is a statistical translation system. It has very little preprogrammed knowledge of grammar, and probably nothing about the meaning of words. It figures those things out by looking at large bodies of text. If Swedes talk about Mona Sahlin with the same stereotypical phrases as we Norwegians speak about Jens Stoltenberg, Google Translate may be misled into thinking they are words describing the same concept. It makes errors like these all the time.
You could perhaps think that names should never be translated, but this is not so. For instance, if I read a Lynvingen comic, Johannesevangeliet and watched "Hjelp, vi flyr", a good translator should understand that I read a Batman comic, the Gospel according to John, and watched "Airplane". Google Translate handles the two first of those, but currently fails on the third. It used to translate all three correctly, but Google seem to have made it less eager to translate names now - perhaps to avoid the very errors you are complaining about. Microsoft's translator, which also is statistical, succeeds at "Airplane" but fails at "Batman". -- Harald Korneliussen (independent Google Translate-watcher :-p ) On 29 Okt, 12:16, Jumpsenhoy wrote: > I suddenly discovered, that you translate the area "Vesterålen" to > "Lofoten" in english - which is a different area, south of Vesterålen. > Why on earth do you do that? It's a bit like translating George to > Franklin - totally different name, totally misleading. > > Even more strange, If I write without our special letter å, > "Vesteraalen", you suddenly translate it to "Vesterålen" in English. > > What? Why? Is this a joke, and when are you finished joking? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "General" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-translate-general?hl=en.
