Hey Product Hunters,
We launched our product yesterday and received many comments about machine translation vs. human translation:
https://www.producthunt.com/post...
It's a topic that fascinates me and I've been collecting fun machine translation failures for a long time, let me share with you some of my faves 😉
I speak some Mandarin Chinese and that's a great language for machine translation failures 😁
1. There is this Chinese set phrase 吃醋 (= to be jealous; literally “to eat vinegar”), and machine translation gets it right. But if we use this phrase in a sentence… 你还会吃前女友的醋吗?
Oops! This awkward moment when “Are you still jealous of your ex?” turns into “Will you still eat the vinegar of his ex-girlfriend?”
2. Another Chinese to English translation example (sorry, didn't keep the Chinese version, but I do have the Google translate screenshot):
“I hope you’ll be beautiful in the future”. Lol what? The original Chinese phrase said “I hope you’ll have a great (“beautiful”) future”.
3. One of the key problems is that machine translation often doesn't get the context. It becomes especially serious if you translate standalone words (like UI or other short strings of text).
In one of translations there was a single word wasted. It was a game context, so apparently it would mean "killed", but it could also mean "spent in vain", "drunk" and many other things.
A human translator can assume the correct meaning based on other strings of this translation, or simply ask you for more details - but the machine won't. It will go for the most common version - in this case, it will be "spent".
4. Another one was when I had an article about games translated from English into Turkish - by a native speaker. I ran the finished translation through Google Translate to check stuff like links and figures in place. And I came across this:
"(İşte bu nedenle,) oyun geliştiricileri için yerelleştirme sürecini olabildiğince baş ağrıtmayan bir iş haline getirebilmek adına, (tasarım sürecinin en başından itibaren uygulanabilecek bir takım kurallar içeren bu listeyi hazırladık.)" - Google Translate said "...in order to make the localization process as a headache as possible for game developers". (WAIT, WHAT??)
The Turkish version actually means “less troublesome as much as possible, less of a headache as much as possible”, but Google translate was telling me the opposite 😆
Please share your opinion and favorite machine translation mistakes in the comments! Also, it would be great to hear your feedback about our human translation platform:
https://www.producthunt.com/post...
Thanks! 🙂
Sembly AI