The 锺书 example matches my experiences with Chinese through Google Translate. Chinese is a language where you'll often redundantly say things because each chara

The 锺书 example matches my experiences with Chinese through Google Translate. Chinese is a language where you'll often redundantly say things because each character may have (a) multiple meanings and (b) a lot of homophones, even accounting for tone. So the word for vegetable(s) is "蔬菜", which really is two different words for "vegetable" put together. I suspect that the engine has "learned" that words can be thrown away sometimes. Which leads to fun cases where it tells you the literal opposite of what you said. An example is in https://twitter.com/ManishEarth/status/919434569446776832 https://twitter.com/ManishEarth/status/919434569446776832 -- it has since been fixed. I bet what happened with 锺书 was that Translate decided to throw away 锺 in one of the cases because it didn't know what to do with it, leaving it with 书 ("book"). ------------- Regarding the anecdote about the Danish-speaking friend, this isn't too uncommon. For example, I natively speak Marathi but spoken/written Marathi differ a lot and I don't have much practice reading/writing, so I make spelling/grammar mistakes. So using Google Translate as a crutch (and then modifying/verifying the output) is great. Though I've found out that it's not really good at non-EU languages (The EU translates all of its documents into the languages of its members so this forms an excellent corpus of professional translations for Google Translate) and that my written Marathi is often better. ------------- My favorite example of Google Translate limitations is what happens if you ask it to translate "Yes." and "No." to Chinese. You get the answer 是 and 没有, which literally translate to "am" and "don't have". (there are no conjugations and kind of no tenses, so by "am" I mean "whatever conjugation of the English word 'to be' makes sense in this context") The thing is, Chinese doesn't really have words for Yes and No. 是的/不是 sometimes works (I think this is more because there are implicit 是s in verbless sentences). But the basic idea is that if you want to answer a question, you repeat the verb. "Do you eat meat?" "Don't eat." or "Do you read books?" "Read.". 是 and 有 are pretty common (as are "to be" and "to have" in English), so it seems like it picked up on the most common yes/no answers. For some reason, it picked a different one for no than it did for yes. Now, this isn't exactly an example of the machine translation sucking, but more of the translation not having an outlet to express ambiguity at all. The article gives examples involving this as well, but the basic idea is that some languages do not allow for the same kind of ambiguity that others do. You should be able to display something about that when translating from an ambiguous term to a specific one. Yes/No is an example of a set of ambiguous terms in English where Chinese has no similar ambiguous terms. In the other direction, as I already explained, 是 (or any verb!) in Chinese is an example of an ambiguous term that doesn't translate to English because the tense need not be fully specified (Chinese does tense from context, and even then it may not be as fully specified as it is in english), and English requires you to handle tense.