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).
