Ideological Google

Published by

Clarissa

January 4, 2016

Google Translate translates “Russians” from Ukrainian to Russian as “invaders” and “Russia” as “Mordor.”

As you probably know, Google doesn’t really translate anything. It simply picks the most frequent usage from its humongous database. Last year, for instance, there were several months during which the Russian name and patronymic “Vladimir Vladimirovich” were translated into English as “Mr. Putin.” This must have really sucked for the rest of Vladimir Vladimiroviches.

Also, last summer, “Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity” would be translated into Russian as “a political crisis in Ukraine.”

Friend! Remember: when you use Google Translate, you are forced to subscribe to its ideology.

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12 responses to “Ideological Google”

thelyniezian

January 4, 2016

Sounds like some insider at Google is deliberately trolling or inserting their own biases, whilst management overlooks because they either don’t know, don’t care or quietly approve.

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1. Stille (@aperfectbalance)
  
  January 4, 2016
  
  This is not manually done. I could buy there being a coordinated Ukrainian attempt to suggest the Mordor translation, for example, but single-author modification of this sort of machine learning framework isn’t easy, and tends to get easily reverted.
  
  I believe the machine learning folk are in agreement with the translators on this one 😉
  
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  1. thelyniezian
    
    January 4, 2016
    
    You’re probably right, but it seems funny enough to want to imagine someone deliberately hacked the software to come up with this stuff.
    
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2. Clarissa
  
  January 4, 2016
  
  No, this is simply how Google Translate works. It doesn’t translate. It looks for equivalents.
  
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  1. thelyniezian
    
    January 4, 2016
    
    I gather that from re-reading your posting; it of course makes perfect sense that this is the reason but amusing to imagine what if it were some covert inside joke.
    
    In seriousness, of course, it gives little reassurance that current levels of technology passing as artificial “intelligence” are up to the job, and it might be far simpler for the core part of it to be programmed from scratch, even if it can’t translate everything.
    
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Michael Blekhman

January 4, 2016

That’s a great post! I’ve been a machine translator since 1985, and I appreciate it greatly. Thanks a lot, Clarissa!

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valter07

January 4, 2016

Not to “its ideology” but to the current dominant ideology. Google per se does not have ideology. For better or for worse. Once several years ago it translated Tallinn as New York. 🙂

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1. Clarissa
  
  January 4, 2016
  
  I’d love to find out how the association between Tallinn and New York was made. 🙂
  
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  1. valter07
    
    January 4, 2016
    
    I guess this is a question for a specialist in machine translation 🙂
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      January 4, 2016
      
      Machine translation has been killed by Google Translate. For all its faults, its cost is $0 and you just can’t compete with that.
      
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valter07

January 4, 2016

From the same source – Lavrov = sad horse.

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1. Clarissa
  
  January 4, 2016
  
  I didn’t mention it because nobody in North America knows who Lavrov even is. But that “translation” is spot on.
  
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