No yolking matter: Google Translate cock-up gives Norwegians more than un œuf eggs A group of Norwegian chefs blames Google Translate after the applications improperly ordered 1500 eggs to 15.000. The incident occurred a few days ago at the Olympic Village in Pyeongchang, where the chefs had been keen to cook for Norway's 109 Olympic athletes. The Winter Games are a big deal in Norway, a country of 5.23 …
That is why you should use a real translator and not an electronic service...
Google Translate has tried to kill me on a few occasions. Luckily I knew both the source and target languages well enough to know it was bs'ing me.
Do not open the case, high voltage inside -> Das Gehäuse öffnen, Starkstrom drinnen -> Open the case, high voltage inside.
I managed to give it the proper translation before it killed somebody else...
Funnier was :
Do not open the case, no user serviceable parts inside -> Das Gehäuse öffnen, nichts drin -> Do not open the case, nothing inside.
"Maybe it's learning...?"
Google Translate often offers different translations for the same words. If you are lucky it offers them as alternatives at the same time. However it can be frustrating to see it offer a wrong or no translation for the same words it got right a few minutes earlier.
@Pen-y-gors as I said, I did take the time to give it the proper translations...
I was in a hurry and needed to translate a complete user manual into German (20 pages) in 2 hours, so I though maybe GT could help, but after I stopped laughing, I translated it by hand and told my boss he would just have to wait until the next day.
"Luckily I knew both the source and target languages well enough to know it was bs'ing me."
Google Translate does tend to drop words or replace a word with a duplicate of a nearby one. Worst of all is when it misses a negative indicator.
My best mistranslation is -
Allehelgenskonsert - which Google automatically detects as "Frisian" language = "Privacy statement".
When told it is Norwegian it comes up with a more obviously sensible "Halloween Concert" - except the Norwegian word has no "evening" component in it - it is literally "All Saints Concert".
Given the context of a Cathedral choir my guess is that it should be "All Saints Day Concert" - making it one day out - and an interesting confusion of beliefs.
I wonder how that came across. One would assume the chefs wrote 1500 instead of its equivalent as Norvegian words. In a little experiment of translating the egg order from Finnish to Korean, Google seemed to leave that number and variants like 1 500 alone. Hmm, maybe the chefs made the blunder themselves in the original text, and are now blaming Google...
OK, the language of the article is a bit odd, but basically understandable, and that's after going both ways.
Google Translate is surprisingly good - not perfect, but useable. If you know that your text will be machine-translated the trick is to use short unambiguous phrases in the original.
I often need to do English->Welsh translations and Google is an excellent starting point. It needs tweaking by a human, but it saves a lot of time.
Things have moved on a lot.
Okay, the language of the article is a bit odd, but it's basically understandable, and that's going on both ways.
Google Translate is a surprise - it's not perfect, but useful. If you know that your text will be translated on a machine, the trick is to use short uncertain phrases in the original.
Often, I need to do English-> Welsh translations and Google is an excellent starting point. It needs human beings, but it saves a lot of time.
Heb fod yn ddrwg - Saesneg -> Cymraeg -> Saesneg, heb law am "short uncertain phrases"!
:-)
M.
Oh, such fun.
Translate often used when commentards start whining about 'use proper English' --which usually gets turned in to a shiny Polish lure and dropped back in the water . . .
If they reply then the game is on -- random and mixed translation.
With huge irony the story had this line:
"1500 eggs to 15.000."
Plenty of people (e.g. in UK( would read the second number as 15 (with pointless zeroes after) - after all you placed a ******** decimal point in there.
To avoid confusion with numbers do not use "separators" just write the full number (commas are bad enough but using a decimal point is deranged as begging to be misinterpreted)
Yankee here - we too use the comma to separate every three powers-of-ten, and I would not have provided fifteen (15) eggs.
I mean, it would have buggered me royally if we were discussing chemistry equations and I'd be freaking out about how I needed to be precisely on-the-dot to three sig-figs, but regarding whole food products, not even an obsessive calorie-counting gram-watcher like myself is going to measure eggs past, say, two sig figs at the most ("Okay, I had one hard-boiled egg at lunch in my salad and my aunt gave me about two-thirds of hers, so I'll plug 1.66 hard-boiled eggs into MFP,) and the sig-figs being zeroes would also be a "hold up and reread this carefully, you're missing something!" flag, leading me to realize it was in silly euro-notation.
That having been said, yeah, the way some writing systems use periods to separate hundreds and thousands is asinine.
That having been said, yeah, the way some writing systems use periods to separate hundreds and thousands is asinine."
But they also use a comma as a decimal separator, so how is that more asinine than driving on the wrong side of the road instead of the left like wot is the proper way?
To avoid confusion with numbers do not use "separators" just write the full number (commas are bad enough but using a decimal point is deranged as begging to be misinterpreted)
Commas make the number far, far easier to read for your average human, if not for a machine. Also note that to be pedantic, "." is not a decimal point, for that you really should use "·" like wot yer teachers taught you to write by hand at school.
3·141592
I did once see an accounting calculator that used apostrophes for separators:
1'234'567.890
M.
I've seen calculators that do the apostrophe thing, too. I think it's meant to make them more visible, since otherwise they'd be right where your hand is and the light is the least.
Also, when and where were you in school? Your post is the very first time I've seen someone claim the period isn't the decimal point.
"Also, when and where were you in school? Your post is the very first time I've seen someone claim the period isn't the decimal point."
In my case, as per my other reply, 40 years ago. And he's right. I was using computers at school then (and forever after too), and ASCII, AFAIK, didn't have a decimal point (or many other less used characters) so you made do with what you had. (Likewise EBCDIC and other character sets in use at the time). eg the single and double quote symbols used as both the 66 & 99 or 6 & 9 proper quote marks, not to mention the various accent etc marks used in non-english languages. If you grew up with GUIs, you may not be aware of some of the conventions forced on us by character set limitations (in text mode only days, characters were often defined by a ROM chip containing the character map). Using the full stop as a decimal point became so ingrained in technology by restricted computer char. sets that it carried over in pretty much all digital representations of decimal numbers such as calculators, cash register displays etc.
Back when I first started teaching IT, nearly 40 years ago, it was on 8-bit computers and we still taught generic office skills such as typing. The typing teacher used to teach the students hit the superscript key and full stop for a decimal point. I only just remembered that as I was typing the above. (they were relatively modern electric typewriters)
"3·141592"
It was so long ago, I'd completely forgotten that! It's 40 years since I did maths at school and have been using computers just as long so have been using the full stop for a decimal point ever since. It actually looks quite odd to see it printed with a proper decimal point after all this time. Thanks for the memory!
I can't remember many of the details of the Portuguese author's handy Russian:English phrasebook which had run through a couple of intermediate languages as the perpetrator didn't possess a direct Russian/English dictionary - but the one which has always stuck in my mind is the rendition of "Out of sight, out of mind":
Invisible idiot.
(Pretty sure it's in Stephen Pile's seminal Book of Heroic Failures)
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