I have a very similar problem - translating from Norwegian to English,
the name of the Norwegian band "Kaizers Orchestra" is always
translated to "David Banner". This doesn't make any sense at all, and
it is incredibly annoying if you use the toolkit to translate news
about the band.
There must be some way to fix that. It can't be that something is
always translated so obviously wrong, just because someone thought it
was funny to suggest a "better" wrong translation.
Ruth
On May 4, 8:46 pm, "[email address]" wrote:
> Is there any way to correct such a "joke" text that's been submitted
> to Google? I keep running into more of these. For example, punch in
> "sigur rós", Icelandic to English (Sigur Rós is an Icelandic band; a
> (grammatically incorrect) translation would be "Victory Rose"). The
> Google result? "Foo Fighters" (a different, non-Icelandic band).
>
> If there's no way this can be fixed, Icelandic translations should
> simply be taken down.
>
> - Karen
>
> On Apr 14, 12:11 am, Glossika Languages wrote:
>
>
>
> > Let me provide you some insight. I'm not affiliated with Google, but
> > I'm a polyglot and I understand how these systems work.
>
> > Google translate works really well when you know how to use it and
> > what kinds of texts it can translate. Basically, the more colloquial
> > something is, the more difficult it will be, for obvious reasons I
> > explain below.
>
> > The translation service uses lexicostatistical methods based on
> > parallel texts. In other words, there's a huge database with all the
> > sentences that have ever been written and their translations next to
> > them. This huge database is mostly English and every other language.
> > The greatest number of parallel-text documents are reports, news, any
> > government translations, technical stuff, patents, etc etc. But for
> > some languages like Icelandic, the amount of parallel texts is much
> > smaller than for more commonly used languages. The downside to the
> > translate feature is that the sentence you're requesting never
> > appeared in any report (especially sentences with "you" and "I" and
> > "could you tell me where" etc) and is generally only spoken, Google's
> > algorithm kicks into play grabbing the most common sentence structure
> > and replacing the vocabulary. I believe a future add-on might be a
> > double cross-check with actual usage in the blogosphere as this
> > represents more spoken language. But Google is already implementing
> > deciphering of all YouTube videos of spoken language which would be
> > even more accurate than the blogosphere. It will be some time for this
> > to mature however.
>
> > If you translate between two other languages like German and Polish,
> > it will end up going through English first which may erase some of the
> > verb conjugations that may exist in those two languages. Some
> > languages like Belorussian and Ukrainian all go through Russian as an
> > intermediate language, not English, so the verb conjugations and
> > declensions all stay intact (but not between Russian and Polish).
>
> > Getting back to your Icelandic. Many people have offered parallel
> > texts directly into Google's database. Google rarely builds the
> > contents of these databases themselves, but rather mines them from
> > users in any way they can. If you go in there and look around, you can
> > see there are some 300 languages you can provide parallel texts for.
> > Once they get enough of a database built up, they can release a
> > language in beta. These texts could potentially contain errors or even
> > deliberate jokes. You can imagine that some kid sitting in Iceland is
> > having fun inputting a whole book of jokes in both English and
> > Icelandic and that ends up as the only source in Google's database of
> > such sentences. When you type an exact match, Google spits out the
> > exact match for you.
>
> > On Apr 13, 6:37 am, "[email address]" wrote:
>
> > > Someone at Google is having fun playing with the translations returned
> > > from English->Icelandic. I've run into a number of things for which
> > > the only possible explanation is someone hard-coding bogus answers
> > > in. Here's what I found first:
>
> > > "Where" returns "Hvar" ("Where")
> > > "Where is" returns "Hvar er" ("Where is")
> > > "Where is the" returns "Hvar er" ("Where is")
> > > "Where is the bathroom?" returns "Talarðu ensku?" ("Do you speak
> > > English?", from ađ tala, to speak, and the accusative form of enska,
> > > "English")
>
> > > Har-di-har-har, Google. You can ask other "Where is" questions and it
> > > translates them correctly, but they hard-coded "Where is the bathroom"
> > > to a joke answer.
>
> > > Want more? Here's a more blatant example.
>
> > > "My" returns "My" (the personal possessive pronoun is a postposition
> > > in Icelandic)
> > > "My hovercraft" returns "Láttu mig" ("Let me", from ađ láta).
> > > "My hovercraft is full of eels" returns "Láttu mig í
> > > friði!" (basically, "Leave me in peace!")
>
> > > There's absolutely no way that's an accident. I mean, they even added
> > > in an exclamation point! And there's no way that Google has a
> > > dictionary where "Láttu" means "Hovercraft".
>
> > > Want more? I keep finding these things. Someone at Google apparently
> > > thinks this service is a big joke. Accidental translation mistakes
> > > are one thing, but deliberate ones are an entirely different story
> > > altogether, and these are clearly not accidental.
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