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Jessica Jones over at The Local continues reporting on an embarrassing gaffe in promoting a vegetable celebration in a town in northwestern Spain. The town, Pontes, publicized its annual rapini festival on the town hall's website.
From the article:
A town hall in northwestern Spain was left red-faced after a Google Translate error led to it advertising its local leaf vegetable celebration as a much more X-rated affair.
One of the highlights of the year in the town of As Pontes in Galicia, northwestern Spain, is its annual rapini festival, when townsfolk celebrate the town's speciality, the leafy green vegetable similar to spinach.
[...] But when residents clicked onto the Castillian Spanish version of the town's website - provided by Google Translate - to check the dates for next year's fest they were shocked at the new turn the festival had apparently taken.
"The clitoris is one of the typical products of Galician cuisine," read the description of the festival on the Castillian Spanish version of the town hall's website, whose original version is written in Galician.
"Google translate recognized our Galician word grelo as Portuguese and translated into the Spanish clítoris," town hall spokeswoman Monserrat García, explained to The Local.
Google Translate changed Feira do grelo (Rapini Festival) into Feria Clítoris (Clitoris Festival) leading to some embarrassment when staff at the town hall discovered their error on Thursday.
While this is embarrassing for the folks in Pontes, it raises some interesting questions as to how useful automated translation software (such as Google Translate) can be.
Have any Soylentils run into issues like this while using automated translation software? Did anyone see the mistranslation and make travel plans based on the it?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 04 2015, @05:59PM
The software gets 95% of it right. That's pretty damn impressive when you're dealing with grammar, multiple word meanings, etc. If what you mean an "interesting" question to be is "if it doesn't get 100% correct, is it 0% useful?", then I'd say most of the "interesting" questions you're thinking about are not very interesting after all.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday November 04 2015, @06:36PM
And this is exactly how AI will work. It mimicks a complex skill humans sometimes fail at as well. All it needs is to be good enough for X, and it's amazing progress.
Last century, no English speakers would be able to read this at all
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Wednesday November 04 2015, @09:11PM
Will the AI take into account political correctness, even if the language is spoken correctly?
Recall the infamous "Ooga-Booga" debacle of Google Translate. Here's some background -- the phrase "Ooga booga" is associated with Africans in a pejorative manner based on stereotypes of what their spoken language is supposed to sound like, similar to how the phrase "ching chong" is associated with Orientals.
Well, some fella typed "ooga booga" [imgur.com] into Google Translate and discovered that it was detected as Somali and had an English translation. "Ooga Booga" no longer translates (though it is still detected as Somalian), because das' raciss' 'n' sheeit, but you might have luck with "yaba daba doo" [imgur.com] or "Oo oo oo oog oo oo ook oo oor oo ool ooda oos oo oo oo oo oo oog ooda" ("And which establish the quality and effectiveness of the ook He and the choice of which to establish plug").
Note: " Oo oo oo oog oo oo ook oo oor oo ool ooda oos oo oo oo oo oo oog ooda " works, but the URL to the translate doesn't link properly(it removes the spaces) so copy and paste it into google translate and see yourself.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Wednesday November 04 2015, @11:13PM
You'd have to go back a *lot* farther than 100 years to reach a point where modern English would be incomprehensible to even an average literate person, let alone all of them. Just to name a couple, the Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published in 1876, and Gulliver's Travels in 1726.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday November 04 2015, @11:44PM
Yes, but 100 years ago the people lacked internet-capable computers, therefore they couldn't read the web pages anyway. ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday November 05 2015, @05:28AM
We're talking about freely available translation services, which indeed didn't exist 100 years ago, and you'd have to pay someone to translate your material.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Wednesday November 04 2015, @06:39PM
it raises some interesting questions as to how useful automated translation software (such as Google Translate) can be.
The software gets 95% of it right. That's pretty damn impressive when you're dealing with grammar, multiple word meanings, etc. If what you mean an "interesting" question to be is "if it doesn't get 100% correct, is it 0% useful?", then I'd say most of the "interesting" questions you're thinking about are not very interesting after all.
Actually, the questions I had in mind relate more to the use of automated translation software when negotiating with folks around the world with whom you don't share a language, or when documents (sometimes large numbers of them) are shared. While the results of the issue mentioned in TFA were embarrassing to the site owners, confusing to some folks, and quite amusing to many others, the obvious question most certainly is not "is this stuff useful at all?"
I didn't even imply that that automated translation software wasn't useful. I was wondering aloud about how often stuff like this happens that *doesn't* get publicity, and how often such issues negatively impact the quality of communication.
If you're attempting to be deliberately obtuse, you're doing a lovely job. Keep up the good work!
If you're attempting to troll, not so much. In that case, keep trying -- you can do much better than that!
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 04 2015, @08:08PM
I was being neither. You pondered about how useful such software can be and I found that to be a very odd question. It is pretty damn clear, to me at least, that it is really really useful. You could give me a book in a language that I have zero proficiency in, and I could tell you exactly what that book was about with almost no effort at all. That's pretty damn useful.
Perhaps you should have deleted the entire first sentence in your comment at the bottom because it completely contradicts your explanation, which is fully captured in your second sentence. Your first sentence is akin to "It does leave one to wonder how useful automobiles are to moving people from place to place."
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Wednesday November 04 2015, @08:48PM
If you're attempting to be deliberately obtuse, you're doing a lovely job. Keep up the good work!
If you're attempting to troll, not so much. In that case, keep trying -- you can do much better than that!
I was being neither. You pondered about how useful such software can be and I found that to be a very odd question. It is pretty damn clear, to me at least, that it is really really useful. You could give me a book in a language that I have zero proficiency in, and I could tell you exactly what that book was about with almost no effort at all. That's pretty damn useful.
I'm sorry you weren't able to follow along, friend. Whether you found the question odd or not is your issue, not mine.
Perhaps you should have deleted the entire first sentence in your comment at the bottom because it completely contradicts your explanation, which is fully captured in your second sentence. Your first sentence is akin to "It does leave one to wonder how useful automobiles are to moving people from place to place."
Thank you for your advice. I'll take it under advisement. It's always nice to have a friendly voice in my ear letting me know what I'm supposed to be thinking and saying. You rock!
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 04 2015, @11:45PM
Google translate runs into some major grammar issues with German.
I've been learning Deutsch for the past 3 years while living there, and I can see why google translate doesn't handle it well.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Wednesday November 04 2015, @11:59PM
Google translate runs into some major grammar issues with German.
I've been learning Deutsch for the past 3 years while living there, and I can see why google translate doesn't handle it well.
I spent quite a while learning (and then speaking whilst I was in Osterreich and Deutschland) Deutsch. It seemed to me that idiomatic phrases were the most difficult. I found it very handy to keep an English-speaking German around so I could always ask: "Wie sagt man das, auf Englisch?" I highly recommend the practice. :)
When I first came across the following, it made me laugh. It still makes me chuckle merrily to myself. I hope it does the same for you
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr