Google Translate users spotted an alarming mistake when entering the phrase “I am sad to see Hong Kong become part of China” into the multilingual machine translation service a few days ago (June 14th).
According to France 24, when the phrase was translated into both Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Google Translate changed the emotion ‘sad’ to ‘happy’, meaning the phrase had a completely different intent and meaning and instead read “I am happy to see Hong Kong become part of China”.
One Facebook user said “Oh my god, I can’t believe my eyes,” in the comments section under screen shots of the mistranslation which went viral.
Rachel Wong, a student on Twitter suggested the app “intentionally mistranslates the English to ‘so happy/content’ instead of ‘so sad’,” and added “I hope Google fixes this.”
Further users checked different language pairs and found that some other combinations also reproduced the error, however, an hour later the correct translation was found to be displayed.
Google’s popular machine translation tool works through complex algorithms and deep learning alongside users being able to add their own suggestions to improve the quality of translations. It uses patterns from millions of existing online translations to form the most appropriate translation.The automatic translation tool is used by around 200 million people per month worldwide.
Unfortunately though, sometimes Google Translate makes mistakes, as you can see below.
In the USA, a suspect on trial was acquitted of all charges after it was found that cops had used Google Translate to request a car search. The problem arose when it was discovered that they forgot to mention that he had the right to refuse the search, and that Google Translate offered the translation ‘can I find the car?’ instead of ‘can I search the car?’.
Likewise, other machine translation systems often lack the finesse and accuracy necessary in the delicate field of language translation;
For instance, Japanese officials in Osaka had to shut down the foreign language website for the city’s subway system after some entertaining translation glitches went viral on social media sites. Names of some of the stops included “Before the Zoo”, “Three Eyes”, “Sakai Muscle” and “Prince Bridge Now City”.
Another infamous machine mistranslation occurred in Fiji, when tourism authorities failed to check a machine translation with native speakers when creating a promotional video about the country. The resulting translation offered the word ‘toilet’ instead of ‘church’ or ‘place of worship’
As you can see, machine translation systems aren’t always effective with language, especially when considering the fluid, changeable nature of linguistics. However, by using a professional translation company such as, Creative Word, you can be guaranteed complete translation success.
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