You know what other things Google did? They made it so that the national anthem of the Republic of Ireland got the line "God save the Queen" in there. They translated YouTube video to PORN video in Russian, and "Photos of Russian cities" became "Photos of US cities". They royally pissed of lots of progressive Italians by turning "I did not vote for Berlusconi" into "I voted for Berlusconi". They deeply offended Palestinians by letting "Israeli killed Palestinian" into "Palestinian killed Israeli". Further, they offended Israeli feminists by always using the male forms when translating sentences like "I drive a car", but female forms when translating "I wash the floor". They showed their anti-Americanism when a massacre by Myanmar (Burmese) forces became a massacre by US forces. Indonesian muslims were outraged when a word meaning "depraved" became translated as "muslim".
Then there was the time a Lithuanian told them the poor translations into that ancient and proud language was an affront to their nation, and they must disable it at once, until they could make it perfect. Then some Greek people complained when the Macedonian language was added, because they think the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia is an ursurper to the name of Macedonia, which is a province of Hellas where they speak Greek. While we're at Balkan, some Serbs were offended that the Latin-alphabet version of their language was called "Croatian" (never mind that virtually the only difference between Croatian and Serbian is that Serbian uses Cyrillic!). And some Turks were mightily offended that for a long time, Google Translate didn't offer their language at all - they thought that was evidence of racism, since Turkish is the third most spoken language in the world (according to Turks in Turkey, that is - they may not understand a word of what the Uighurs in China say, but it will be called Turkish for patriotic purposes!) There are two lessons from all of this. The first is: There are a lot of proud people in the world, who are quick to take insult at perceived offense to their culture or language. The second, and more important, is that Google Translate uses statistical translation. They didn't actually set out to offend Catalonians, Irish, Muslims, Serbs, Turks, Italians or anyone else. The poor engineers at Google don't tell it how a word should be translated, they've written a program that figures it out on its own, based on the text it sees. Sometimes it makes outrageous mistakes. Maybe they should improve it. I am sure they are doing their best. Meanwhile, let's cut them some slack - it's not as if we pay them. -- 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.
