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Bad training data. Lorem Ipsum is the de facto placeholder text for so many webpages.

by ww520 12y ago

PeterisP 12y ago
I work with machine translation - such artifacts would be a natural result from multilingual webpages that aren't yet fully translated. An article would have correct text in English, Chinese or Spanish but the "translation" in some other language could have some Lorem Ipsum left there. Statistical machine translation systems would easily pick that up, as crawling 'multilingual' sites with same/similar content is a major source for machine translation training data.
yen223 12y ago
That is correct. The interesting question is, why did it translate to 'China', rather than something more banal?
- JonnieCache 12y ago
  Agreed. It's the presence of China, NATO, Russia, and The Company all under one cryptic roof that makes it weird.
- blowski 12y ago
  It could just be a selection bias, in that we think it's interesting so it makes the news. If it had translated to something more banal, we probably wouldn't be discussing it on Hacker News.
blauwbilgorgel 12y ago
I remembered a discussion about this before, once in 2010 and once in 2013. Already in 2010 Lorum Ipsum was translated to random words that are very prevalent on the internet: "hello world", "learn more" and "free on": http://www.xefer.com/2010/10/lorem-ipsum http://www.xefer.com/2010/10/lorem-ipsum Therefor I don't think that Google Translate is used by spies to communicate plans about China. Even if all translated words were insidious, then still Occam's Razor tells us it is unlikely that a public translating service is used as a modern-day number station. The 2013 discussion had translations like: "Cisco Security" and "Corporate Japan": http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/06/lorem-ipsum-google-translate.html http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/06/lorem-ipsum-google-... That's statistical machine translation for you.

Bad training data. Lorem Ipsum is the de facto placeholder text for so many webpages.

by ww520 12y ago

Bad training data. Lorem Ipsum is the de facto placeholder text for so many webpages.

I work with machine translation - such artifacts would be a natural result from multilingual webpages that aren't yet fully translated. An article would have correct text in English, Chinese or Spanish but the "translation" in some other language could have some Lorem Ipsum left there. Statistical machine translation systems would easily pick that up, as crawling 'multilingual' sites with same/similar content is a major source for machine translation training data.

yen223 12y ago

That is correct. The interesting question is, why did it translate to 'China', rather than something more banal?

JonnieCache 12y ago
Agreed. It's the presence of China, NATO, Russia, and The Company all under one cryptic roof that makes it weird.
blowski 12y ago
It could just be a selection bias, in that we think it's interesting so it makes the news. If it had translated to something more banal, we probably wouldn't be discussing it on Hacker News.

blauwbilgorgel 12y ago

I remembered a discussion about this before, once in 2010 and once in 2013. Already in 2010 Lorum Ipsum was translated to random words that are very prevalent on the internet: "hello world", "learn more" and "free on": http://www.xefer.com/2010/10/lorem-ipsum http://www.xefer.com/2010/10/lorem-ipsum Therefor I don't think that Google Translate is used by spies to communicate plans about China. Even if all translated words were insidious, then still Occam's Razor tells us it is unlikely that a public translating service is used as a modern-day number station. The 2013 discussion had translations like: "Cisco Security" and "Corporate Japan": http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/06/lorem-ipsum-google-translate.html http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/06/lorem-ipsum-google-... That's statistical machine translation for you.