Comments on: 10 Inexplicable Google Translate Fails

By: David

David — Tue, 17 Sep 2013 11:59:02 +0000

The fundamental problem when translating between two non-english languages (say, Italian to German) is that google always translates to English first (Italian to English then English to German). With all those English words that have more than one meanings, you have an instant recipe for confusion. “Molla” becomes “Frühling” because google can’t tell the difference between a piece of coiled wire and the season following Winter.
🙂

By: Emma Reed

Emma Reed — Sun, 29 Jul 2012 16:24:41 +0000

This is an excellent example of how machine translation is not perfect. And specially in some cases as mentioned above it is pathetic.

This point is always advocated by the translation companies that use human translation methods for getting accurate translations. Generally many take it as a marketing gimmick but examples mentioned prove the facts.

Somehow I would like to share one advantage of the Google or other online translation methods. For those that don’t understand other foreign language at all can at least get a feel of what a sentence or email sent could roughly mean. You can use Google along with some other translating website so that both will not make same mistakes. I have used this method practically and found it worked to the best of my expectations.

By: JP

JP — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 16:13:20 +0000

The last one (Beatbox)… Put it from finnish to german :D:D:D

By: Bradd Libby

Bradd Libby — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 20:23:29 +0000

Thanks for rounding up these interesting examples.

I’ve typed gibberish into Google Translate before to find out which languages they are working on adding. Here’s a list of languages I found. I wouldn’t mind hearing about others.

Translate seems to have problems with some types of nouns. Here’s one example where ‘Oslo’ was mistranslated as ‘London’, and here’s a blog post about problems with problems with prices, dates and more.