10 ms·

Google translated Russia to 'Mordor' in 'automated' error

245 points by dan1234 11y ago

leojg 11y ago
Ok, then I suppose that you can't simply walk into russia... ok sorry for the bad joke
- sageikosa 11y ago
  But you can simply bicycle out (as the stream of Syrian refugees entering Norway from Russia illustrates). Ergo, you cannot simply walk out of Russia (to Norway) either.
  - csn 11y ago
    This was happening at the Finnish border, too, but just recently Finnish authorities banned crossing it with a bicycle, officially for safety reasons.
willvarfar 11y ago
Tangentially reminds me of the recent Ludum Dare "best innovation" winning game entry that uses Google auto-correction (not translation): Infinity Monkey Autocorrect "This funk-filled game explores what would happen to the Infinity Monkey/Typewriter Theorem if it had a commercially-biased autocorrect. The game submits to a growing body of monkey-submitted literature." http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=45696 http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid... View the growing body of literature submitted through the game by monkeys (players): http://ld34.idumpling.com/manuscripts.txt http://ld34.idumpling.com/manuscripts.txt Extract: "the difference, quickbooks online baby eats frog laid. the university favoured.. Dkdkbi ignored.. B bet but, the quotes" Fantastic :)
- dasboth 11y ago
  This is superb! I've often wondered how autocorrect would finish some of my messages on my phone. It gives some really weird suggestions after certain words, perhaps it's worth investigating further.
avar 11y ago
Related algorithmic gaffe, "Google Mistakenly Tags Black People as ‘Gorillas,’": http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/07/01/google-mistakenly-tags-black-people-as-gorillas-showing-limits-of-algorithms/ http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/07/01/google-mistakenly-tag...
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
ukie 11y ago
It was not an error. It is indeed a Mordor.
Mahn 11y ago
I wonder if these "algorithmic errors" are the result of people "maliciously" training Google Translate, since there's the option to correct and give a better translation. I wouldn't be surprised if it were programmed to automatically assume that a correction is good if multiple people correct the same thing, which would then lead to these gaffes as communities like 4chan figured it out and "exploited" it.
- Borogravia 11y ago
  People have been doing "google bombs" like this for about a decade, haven't they?
  - baileyjp 11y ago
    Yes. I believe that this has happened on more than one occasion before. Maybe 4chan could be behind this.
- _yosefk 11y ago
  Why the quotation marks? If you were working on Google Translate, then dealing with this sort of thing would be on your TODO list as an exploit, not an "exploit." As a user of Google Translate it's not helpful, either (that a user thinks that Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia are both evil states does not mean that the user is helped by reading about a war of Mordor against Mordor.) It's funny and all, but it's definitely an exploit.
- dan1234 11y ago
  That was my first thought, but the article has this paragraph near the bottom: "Although translations are managed automatically, it is possible for users to suggest alternative translations manually. However, the BBC understands that this was not how the errors were introduced."
  - avodonosov 11y ago
    > BBC understands it's an oxymoron IMHO
dannyrosen 11y ago
The article's picture of Sergey Lavrov and its caption is comical and clever
stonewhite 11y ago
Also related, Google Translate can "learn" and "translate" lorem ipsum: http://tinyurl.com/hue43an http://tinyurl.com/hue43an Not sure if this is a bug or a feature.
- andreasklinger 11y ago
  might be just lucky overlap between "lorem ipsom" and the latin texts it is inspired by
- alblue 11y ago
  Lorem Ipsum is a passage quoted from a Latin book "De finibus bonorum et malorum" and has been used by typesetters for seventy or eighty years. So the fact it can be translated shouldn't be a surprise.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - duskwuff 11y ago
    Lorem Ipsum is based on that passage, but has been mangled significantly in the adaptation. "Lorem" is half of the word "dolorem", for instance. So it can't actually be translated in any real sense. Instead, if you try translating that passage from Latin, Google Translate goes nuts. Since "Lorem Ipsum" is used as filler text in a bunch of web sites, it finds apparently parallel texts all over the place and ends up cobbling together a "translation" out of random phrases. IIRC, "lorem ipsum" alone used to translate to something like "click here"? (It's passed through unchanged now.)
daturkel 11y ago
The way Google Translate works, which is actually explained pretty nicely by Google statement quoted in this article, makes this a non-story in my opinion. Whether by an intentional attack (somehow flooding the Google corpus [the whole indexed web in a given language?] with biased texts) or a statistical mishap, this is ultimately fairly uninteresting when you realize that: no, no one at Google "snuck" this in there. In the attack scenario, if there were details as to how someone pulled off a Google-bomb style attack, that would be kind of fun and interesting. Otherwise, there's not much to say.
- d0mine 11y ago
  How likely that the Ministry of Truth has asked Google to make a "mistake"?
  - pekk 11y ago
    Who do you mean by "the Ministry of Truth"?
    - crpatino 11y ago
      If you truly did not get it, go read 1984, now. On the other hand, asking which specific (US) agency plays the exact same role as the Ministry of Truth in the novel is kind of pointless. The short answer is none, but that doesn't mean the same kind of propaganda is not happening in a more nuanced/subtle form nowadays.
- daturkel 11y ago
  Looks like it's too late for me to edit parent comment, but see tetromino_'s comment for cool details behind why this may have happened. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10858904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10858904
mfer 11y ago
This was likely an issue of machine learning. The machine learning picked up on patterns people were using. Note, I have no inside knowledge. But, the usefulness of machine learning for things like this.
cimi_ 11y ago
Ukraine is awesome! They also had Darth Vader running for mayor. 'He joins Peking Duck and a man calling himself Putin in the leadership race.' http://www.euronews.com/2015/10/23/ukraine-darth-vader-runs-for-mayor/ http://www.euronews.com/2015/10/23/ukraine-darth-vader-runs-...
eugenekolo2 11y ago
Wild guess: It probably took 'Mir', meaning world, kingdom, etc. in Russian, and made a connection to "Mordor", or perhaps "Mordor" is even spelled as "Mirdor" in Russian.
- ljak 11y ago
  In modern usage, Mir means world, not kingdom, and Mordor is not spelled Mirdor. Besides, that's not how Google's translation system works.
  - eugenekolo2 11y ago
    Mir can mean numerous things. And how is it not how Google Translate works? Do you have inside information? Because the only information we have is that it scours the web, makes connections, and forms a graph. Can feed it some "corrective" data as well.
rogeryu 11y ago
The quotation for 'automated' made me think this was an intentional error made by Google.
- gus_massa 11y ago
  Apparently the BBC use exact-quotes instead of scare-quotes. More details in this previous thread about an article in The Guardian: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6446811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6446811
juanmacuevas 11y ago
here is another weird translation bug https://translate.google.nl/#nl/en/Be%20the%20first%20to%20write%20a%20response https://translate.google.nl/#nl/en/Be%20the%20first%20to%20w...
- plexicle 11y ago
  What the hell? How...
lisivka 11y ago
Mordo(r) territory is pictured at old maps north-east to Mordva people. Rus` captured it and then Russia emerged there, so Google is right (a bit).
shmerl 11y ago
And can you guess whom they translated as Sauron or Morgoth? And it's not like it's the first time ;) http://www.kulichki.com/tolkien/podshivka/970121.htm http://www.kulichki.com/tolkien/podshivka/970121.htm
tetromino_ 11y ago
Explanation for those unfamiliar with Russophone online culture: in the Russian-speaking internet, Russia's gopniks (approximate equivalent of England's chavs) have for a long time been occasionally referred to as orcs or goblins. In the context of the Russian/Ukrainian conflict, this has expanded to anti-Putinist opposition and pro-Ukrainian trolls labeling pro-Putin Russians as orcs, and Russia itself as Mordor, land of the orcs. (Examples of usage: http://spektr.press/chto-eto-s-nimi/ http://spektr.press/chto-eto-s-nimi/ http://grani.ru/opinion/portnikov/m.235880.html http://grani.ru/opinion/portnikov/m.235880.html) This also ties into an old Russian geek tradition of identifying fantasy-genre elves with America and the West (which is very obvious in some fictional universes; e.g. in Tolkien's works, Valinor geographically corresponds to North America), with the natural implication that orcs and goblins (the opponents of the elves) are Russians, and therefore basically good guys but tragically misunderstood by the world. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer for this viewpoint expanded into a novel. So either google's algorithms had identified a sufficient number of humorous references to Russia as Mordor, or some intrepid band of trolls decided to google-bomb the algorithm to push this translation.
- daturkel 11y ago
  Fantastic—this should've been in the article!
- avodonosov 11y ago
  As a person native to russophone online culture: this "explanation" is your fantasy. It's true ukrainian coments in forums can call russia mordor, but it's not an extension of any previous background. And IMHO it doesn't require explanation. BTW, I have never heard about america = valinor.
  - tetromino_ 11y ago
    > this "explanation" is your fantasy. My educated guess :) Every meme starts from somewhere. For example, the vatnik meme did not appear fully formed from the vacuum like Venus from ocean foam; it was invented by a specific person, who was (according to interviews) influenced by Spongebob Squarepants - hence the shape. I don't know who invented the Russia/Mordor theme, but I can try to guess where in the online cultural background that existed in 2013 that person could have found their inspiration. > And IMHO it doesn't require explanation. IMHO it does require explanation. Why Mordor and not Nilfgaard or Fire Nation? Why Sauron and not Voldemort or Tywin Lannister?
Bjartr 11y ago
Is there a Ukrainian meme "One does not simply walk into Russia"?
tellor 11y ago
I think this error is related with using "suggest translation" issues
tangled_zans 11y ago
This is bizzare for me since I was messing around with the XKCD-substitutions plugin a few weeks ago, and replacing "Russia" with "Mordor" was one of the changes that I made. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/xkcd-substitutions/jkgogmboalmaijfgfhfepckdgjeopfhk?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/xkcd-substitutions...
squozzer 11y ago
Funny. It reminds me of the time I saw a picture of the Kremlin and thought "Mordor meets Candyland."
amaks 11y ago
Deservingly.

245 points by dan1234 11y ago

leojg 11y ago

Ok, then I suppose that you can't simply walk into russia... ok sorry for the bad joke

sageikosa 11y ago
But you can simply bicycle out (as the stream of Syrian refugees entering Norway from Russia illustrates). Ergo, you cannot simply walk out of Russia (to Norway) either.
- csn 11y ago
  This was happening at the Finnish border, too, but just recently Finnish authorities banned crossing it with a bicycle, officially for safety reasons.

willvarfar 11y ago

Tangentially reminds me of the recent Ludum Dare "best innovation" winning game entry that uses Google auto-correction (not translation): Infinity Monkey Autocorrect "This funk-filled game explores what would happen to the Infinity Monkey/Typewriter Theorem if it had a commercially-biased autocorrect. The game submits to a growing body of monkey-submitted literature." http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=45696 http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid... View the growing body of literature submitted through the game by monkeys (players): http://ld34.idumpling.com/manuscripts.txt http://ld34.idumpling.com/manuscripts.txt Extract: "the difference, quickbooks online baby eats frog laid. the university favoured.. Dkdkbi ignored.. B bet but, the quotes" Fantastic :)

dasboth 11y ago
This is superb! I've often wondered how autocorrect would finish some of my messages on my phone. It gives some really weird suggestions after certain words, perhaps it's worth investigating further.

avar 11y ago

Related algorithmic gaffe, "Google Mistakenly Tags Black People as ‘Gorillas,’": http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/07/01/google-mistakenly-tags-black-people-as-gorillas-showing-limits-of-algorithms/ http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/07/01/google-mistakenly-tag...

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

ukie 11y ago

It was not an error. It is indeed a Mordor.

Mahn 11y ago

I wonder if these "algorithmic errors" are the result of people "maliciously" training Google Translate, since there's the option to correct and give a better translation. I wouldn't be surprised if it were programmed to automatically assume that a correction is good if multiple people correct the same thing, which would then lead to these gaffes as communities like 4chan figured it out and "exploited" it.

Borogravia 11y ago
People have been doing "google bombs" like this for about a decade, haven't they?
- baileyjp 11y ago
  Yes. I believe that this has happened on more than one occasion before. Maybe 4chan could be behind this.
_yosefk 11y ago
Why the quotation marks? If you were working on Google Translate, then dealing with this sort of thing would be on your TODO list as an exploit, not an "exploit." As a user of Google Translate it's not helpful, either (that a user thinks that Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia are both evil states does not mean that the user is helped by reading about a war of Mordor against Mordor.) It's funny and all, but it's definitely an exploit.
dan1234 11y ago
That was my first thought, but the article has this paragraph near the bottom: "Although translations are managed automatically, it is possible for users to suggest alternative translations manually. However, the BBC understands that this was not how the errors were introduced."
- avodonosov 11y ago
  > BBC understands it's an oxymoron IMHO

dannyrosen 11y ago

The article's picture of Sergey Lavrov and its caption is comical and clever

stonewhite 11y ago

Also related, Google Translate can "learn" and "translate" lorem ipsum: http://tinyurl.com/hue43an http://tinyurl.com/hue43an Not sure if this is a bug or a feature.

andreasklinger 11y ago
might be just lucky overlap between "lorem ipsom" and the latin texts it is inspired by
alblue 11y ago
Lorem Ipsum is a passage quoted from a Latin book "De finibus bonorum et malorum" and has been used by typesetters for seventy or eighty years. So the fact it can be translated shouldn't be a surprise.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- duskwuff 11y ago
  Lorem Ipsum is based on that passage, but has been mangled significantly in the adaptation. "Lorem" is half of the word "dolorem", for instance. So it can't actually be translated in any real sense. Instead, if you try translating that passage from Latin, Google Translate goes nuts. Since "Lorem Ipsum" is used as filler text in a bunch of web sites, it finds apparently parallel texts all over the place and ends up cobbling together a "translation" out of random phrases. IIRC, "lorem ipsum" alone used to translate to something like "click here"? (It's passed through unchanged now.)

daturkel 11y ago

The way Google Translate works, which is actually explained pretty nicely by Google statement quoted in this article, makes this a non-story in my opinion. Whether by an intentional attack (somehow flooding the Google corpus [the whole indexed web in a given language?] with biased texts) or a statistical mishap, this is ultimately fairly uninteresting when you realize that: no, no one at Google "snuck" this in there. In the attack scenario, if there were details as to how someone pulled off a Google-bomb style attack, that would be kind of fun and interesting. Otherwise, there's not much to say.

d0mine 11y ago
How likely that the Ministry of Truth has asked Google to make a "mistake"?
- pekk 11y ago
  Who do you mean by "the Ministry of Truth"?
  - crpatino 11y ago
    If you truly did not get it, go read 1984, now. On the other hand, asking which specific (US) agency plays the exact same role as the Ministry of Truth in the novel is kind of pointless. The short answer is none, but that doesn't mean the same kind of propaganda is not happening in a more nuanced/subtle form nowadays.
daturkel 11y ago
Looks like it's too late for me to edit parent comment, but see tetromino_'s comment for cool details behind why this may have happened. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10858904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10858904

mfer 11y ago

This was likely an issue of machine learning. The machine learning picked up on patterns people were using. Note, I have no inside knowledge. But, the usefulness of machine learning for things like this.

cimi_ 11y ago

Ukraine is awesome! They also had Darth Vader running for mayor. 'He joins Peking Duck and a man calling himself Putin in the leadership race.' http://www.euronews.com/2015/10/23/ukraine-darth-vader-runs-for-mayor/ http://www.euronews.com/2015/10/23/ukraine-darth-vader-runs-...

eugenekolo2 11y ago

Wild guess: It probably took 'Mir', meaning world, kingdom, etc. in Russian, and made a connection to "Mordor", or perhaps "Mordor" is even spelled as "Mirdor" in Russian.

ljak 11y ago
In modern usage, Mir means world, not kingdom, and Mordor is not spelled Mirdor. Besides, that's not how Google's translation system works.
- eugenekolo2 11y ago
  Mir can mean numerous things. And how is it not how Google Translate works? Do you have inside information? Because the only information we have is that it scours the web, makes connections, and forms a graph. Can feed it some "corrective" data as well.

rogeryu 11y ago

The quotation for 'automated' made me think this was an intentional error made by Google.

gus_massa 11y ago
Apparently the BBC use exact-quotes instead of scare-quotes. More details in this previous thread about an article in The Guardian: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6446811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6446811

juanmacuevas 11y ago

here is another weird translation bug https://translate.google.nl/#nl/en/Be%20the%20first%20to%20write%20a%20response https://translate.google.nl/#nl/en/Be%20the%20first%20to%20w...

plexicle 11y ago
What the hell? How...

lisivka 11y ago

Mordo(r) territory is pictured at old maps north-east to Mordva people. Rus` captured it and then Russia emerged there, so Google is right (a bit).

shmerl 11y ago

And can you guess whom they translated as Sauron or Morgoth? And it's not like it's the first time ;) http://www.kulichki.com/tolkien/podshivka/970121.htm http://www.kulichki.com/tolkien/podshivka/970121.htm

tetromino_ 11y ago

Explanation for those unfamiliar with Russophone online culture: in the Russian-speaking internet, Russia's gopniks (approximate equivalent of England's chavs) have for a long time been occasionally referred to as orcs or goblins. In the context of the Russian/Ukrainian conflict, this has expanded to anti-Putinist opposition and pro-Ukrainian trolls labeling pro-Putin Russians as orcs, and Russia itself as Mordor, land of the orcs. (Examples of usage: http://spektr.press/chto-eto-s-nimi/ http://spektr.press/chto-eto-s-nimi/ http://grani.ru/opinion/portnikov/m.235880.html http://grani.ru/opinion/portnikov/m.235880.html) This also ties into an old Russian geek tradition of identifying fantasy-genre elves with America and the West (which is very obvious in some fictional universes; e.g. in Tolkien's works, Valinor geographically corresponds to North America), with the natural implication that orcs and goblins (the opponents of the elves) are Russians, and therefore basically good guys but tragically misunderstood by the world. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer for this viewpoint expanded into a novel. So either google's algorithms had identified a sufficient number of humorous references to Russia as Mordor, or some intrepid band of trolls decided to google-bomb the algorithm to push this translation.

daturkel 11y ago
Fantastic—this should've been in the article!
avodonosov 11y ago
As a person native to russophone online culture: this "explanation" is your fantasy. It's true ukrainian coments in forums can call russia mordor, but it's not an extension of any previous background. And IMHO it doesn't require explanation. BTW, I have never heard about america = valinor.
- tetromino_ 11y ago
  > this "explanation" is your fantasy. My educated guess :) Every meme starts from somewhere. For example, the vatnik meme did not appear fully formed from the vacuum like Venus from ocean foam; it was invented by a specific person, who was (according to interviews) influenced by Spongebob Squarepants - hence the shape. I don't know who invented the Russia/Mordor theme, but I can try to guess where in the online cultural background that existed in 2013 that person could have found their inspiration. > And IMHO it doesn't require explanation. IMHO it does require explanation. Why Mordor and not Nilfgaard or Fire Nation? Why Sauron and not Voldemort or Tywin Lannister?

Bjartr 11y ago

Is there a Ukrainian meme "One does not simply walk into Russia"?

tellor 11y ago

I think this error is related with using "suggest translation" issues

tangled_zans 11y ago

This is bizzare for me since I was messing around with the XKCD-substitutions plugin a few weeks ago, and replacing "Russia" with "Mordor" was one of the changes that I made. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/xkcd-substitutions/jkgogmboalmaijfgfhfepckdgjeopfhk?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/xkcd-substitutions...

squozzer 11y ago

Funny. It reminds me of the time I saw a picture of the Kremlin and thought "Mordor meets Candyland."

amaks 11y ago

Deservingly.