Hi Serdar, First let me say that this is definitely *not* some intentional joke, but rather an example of the many challenges in statistical machine translation. Our system learns by analyzing many parallel (i.e., already translated) documents, finding which Turkish phrases align with which English phrases, counting those instances, then doing our best to produce the most statistically likely translation.
These incorrect translations of names likely came from some documents where when they were originally translated (by a person), the translator likely changed the names in the text from Turkish names to English names. Our system then learned that those were appropriate translations of those names. You can learn more about how our system works here: http://translate.google.com/about/ and definitely let me know if you have questions. I'll have a look into these specific cases, and see if we can find a general way to fix it. Also, if you're interested, you can use some markup in your page which will prevent certain text from being translated, and thus would leave your name as it is. Try putting this in your page: <span class=notranslate>Serdar</span> Best, Josh Estelle Senior Software Engineer Google Translate On Feb 11, 3:30 am, serdarsenay wrote: > When I translated my Turkish webpage kolaywebsayfasi.com, I realised > my and my business partner's names were ALSO TRANSLATED, and for the > worst into English female names, Google Translate translates my name, > Serdar into LISA and my business partner's name Erhan into AMBER and > on some occations ESTHER (depending on his name being in an <a> tag or > not). > > Finding this out was hilarious but equally embarassing on the Google's > end, appearantly someone doing manual translation work pulled a joke > on his friends, and this somehow made it into Google's production > code! Funny... -- 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.
