(Yes, I've searched for this, seems to be no other reports other than someone complaining about a similar but more wide ranging thing in Dutch in 2010)
Don't know how widespread this is, but I've just used the built-in Chrome webpage translator to read some french technical and legislative documents in english... ...and it's translating "Kilométres par heure" directly into "Miles per hour". Without altering the numbers. This is very strange behaviour, there's no way that this could ever be right (a stock 2CV can't do 110 mph, the speed limit on the autoroute is certainly not 130 mph, etc...) and could definitely lead to a lot of misleading translations. I only spotted it because I was researching something about moped laws and happened to know that they're restricted to 45 km/h not 45 mph - either of which could seem likely to someone unfamiliar with the subject. I suspect the machine translation learning routine was smart enough to put human-interpreted documents of this type side by side and notice that "miles per hour" was used in place of "kilometres par heure" in various sentences, but the differing figures alongside each instance disappeared into the statistical soup because of all the other places where more "correct" conversions would have been used. (Unless of course there's now a small but non-zero chance it will occasionally translate "un cent treize" as "eighty-one"?) Is there a way of inserting a hard rule that a figure stated in km/h in french (...and spanish, german, italian, japanese etc?) will still be shown as km/h in english post-translation? After all, it makes even less sense for english speakers living in Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand... (And the question now has to be - does the reverse also apply? Will a french speaker looking up documents on US or UK law be faced with translations that suggest british urban areas are under a 30 km/h default limit, or that america laboured under a 55 km/h freeway limit for most of the 1980s?) If this was intended for translating scientific documents, things could get somewhat more serious...! Thanks :) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "General" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-translate-general/-/RQM6JMkzlU8J. 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.
