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Don't Google translate too much

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Automatic translation tools are just not trustworthy. I’ve said it before many times, and written several pages about it in Swedish under Översättning (Translation).

However, if you just want to have a bit of fun on Google Translate’s expence. Try to do this little funny practice.

Go to Google Translate. Type the following line into the translate text box:

my mom is nice and cool

Select English to Spanish from the dropdown menu.
Click the Translate button.

The text translates into the Spanish sentense

mi mama está agradable y fresca

This looks fine to me, although I did have very poor grades in Spanish. However, Google Translate missed at least one acute accent: mama should have been [fet:mamá]. This will prove to be a crucial error, when we take the translated sentence back to English.

Now, copy the Spanish text and paste it into the Translate text box.
Select Spanish to English and again, click the Translate button.

The result is quite surprising actually:

my breast is pleasant and fresh

WTF? How could ”my mom is nice and cool” translate into ”my breast is pleasant and fresh”!?!?!? It’s not only the missed accent that turned mom into breast. It’s all about meaning, that a machine just cannot translate.

So don’t come and tell me that automated transation tools are usable.

Passa på att läsa

Flikar och ”fäll ut”-innehåll – nästan lika dåligt som dold text

I slutet av januari gjordes en av de större uppdateringarna av Googles riktlinjer för webbplatsägare, och det enligt mig intressantaste stycket kan få stor påverkan på hur webbplatser hanterar javascript-objekt som fäller ut mer text eller visar menyer först efter att man scrollar nedåt på sidan. Så har du en sajt som visar större delen av ett textobjekt först efter att användaren klickar på [fäll ut] eller [visa], så bör du nog läsa den här artikeln.

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  • After re-vistiting this post I find that Google have now changed the initial Spanish translation from ”mi mama está agradable y fresca” to ”mi mama está agradable y fresca”, and thus corrected the problem. Now it translates back in the right way.

  • After re-vistiting this post I find that Google have now changed the initial Spanish translation from ”mi mama está agradable y fresca” to ”mi mama está agradable y fresca”, and thus corrected the problem. Now it translates back in the right way.

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