3 ms·
An interesting Google Translate quirk
- ram1024 18y agoHAH it's a conSPIRACY!
- iseff 18y agoNow remove the period at the end of the URL. :)
- DavidSJ 18y agoInterestingly, if you remove "ensemble", then it reverses it. So: "Nous parlons français ensemble." -> "We speak English together." "Nous parlons français ensemble" -> "We all speak French" "Nous parlons français." -> "We speak French." "Nous parlons français" -> "We speak English"
- DougBTX 18y agoAlso, it is language dependant, in German we speak French together: Wir sprechen französisch zusammen
- jonas_b 18y agoIve had this with Swedish as well. Jag kan inte prata svenska turns into: I can't speak English
- jcl 18y agoNice. It looks like it's confusing the different meanings of "English": "a language originating in England" vs. "native tongue". If you're translating something like "Give it to me in plain English", you'd want the second meaning. Likewise, "It's Greek to me" doesn't hold the quite same weight when translated literally into Greek.
- maw 18y agoCould be. If you tell it to translate to Spanish, it says "Inglés" (which is incorrect, btw, since it shouldn't be capitalized) or "francés", depending on whether you leave the period. But, if you tell it to translate into German, it says "französisch" either way.
- alexandros 18y agoYeap. In Greek we say 'It's chinese to me'. I wonder what the chinese say :)
- silentbicycle 18y agoGood question. After a bit of searching, I found these nation / translation tables. Neat! * http://www.omniglot.com/language/idioms/incomprehensible.php * http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Greek-to-me
- litewulf 18y agoIs this a quirk of statistical machine translation where the word English shows up in English texts where Francais would show up in French texts?
- tr4nslator 18y agoIt's a lesson in the difference between translation and localization. In this case, Google's approach confuses the latter for the former, because its corpus contains parallel texts that have not only been translated (into a different language), but also localized (into a different locale). For example, it may be extrapolating incorrectly from a French document and an English document with the following phrases in the same location: FR Cliquez ici pour la version anglaise. EN Click here for the French version. This sign is another good example of how parallel texts are not always translations: http://flickr.com/photos/jadelin/2205088201/ http://flickr.com/photos/jadelin/2205088201/ (the Japanese "おかえりなさい" here means "Welcome home")
- staunch 18y agoIn your Japanese airport example I think they're intentionally not the same phrase. "Welcome back" to the Japanese people and "Welcome to Japan" to the foreigners.
- tr4nslator 18y agoYes, that is why it's not a translation, but a localization (you know, for the locals).
- staunch 18y agoGotcha.