HN

Comments (99)

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  wat10000
  Maybe twenty years ago, Google Translate had a fun bug with the word "amistad." In Spanish->English mode, it would correctly translate this to "friendship." If you added an exclamation mark, it would translate with the exclamation mark, so "amistad!" became "friendship!" If you added more, it would add to the translation, so "amistad!!!" became "friendship!!!" Except if you used exactly five exclamation marks, no more and no less, it would translate "amistad!!!!!" to "murder!"
• mattsnuts
  Fawk yes!
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  jbarbs
  As a native Spanish speaker it took me a moment to understand why "yes" was being translated as "forks" until it clicked and it's not an error.In Spanish "Ye" is how we call the letter Y and "La ye" is a word used, at least in the version of Spanish spoken where I come from, to refer to the place where a road forks. Hence the fork in the road is "La ye" and the plural would be "Las yes" or the forks. In this context forks is referring to where the road forks not to the eating utensil (which would be "tenedores").
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  miki123211
  I think I have a better one.I was trying to download some software from a Japanese website (this was about 10 yrs ago I think). There was an entire survey you had to fill out first. Since I speak no Japanese, I naturally used Google Translate (to Polish, not even to English).That survey had a "gender" field, and the options were something like "person" and "woman".Then there are the automatic (mis)translations of button labels and other similar strings in software, where the translating tool often only has a single and ambiguous word to go on, with no context whatsoever.THe funniest ones I've seen are "branch" (satellite office) versus "branch" (of a tree), "book" (a flight) versus "book" (something you read), "character" (ASCII or Unicode) versus "character" (in a story), "clear" (to remove all) versus "clear" (translated as "cloudless", referring to the sky), "letters" (delivered by a postman) versus "letters" (and not digits), "rate" (how fast. i.e. speech rate) versus "rate" (how much you charge per minute), "prune" (remove all) versus "prune" (dried plum), "manual" (and not automatic) versus "manual" (a user manual), "clubs" (places you go to) versus "clubs" (and not diamonds or spades, "queen of clubs" hav a particularly interesting meaning here), "number" (that you call) versus "number" (of things), "at" (@) versus at (home), "tab" (key) versus "tab" (in a browser), "close" (to me) versus "close" (something), "back" (button) versus "back" (a body part), as well as all the "party" (adventuring team in an RPG) versus "party" (legal entity, i.e. "third party") versus "party" (as in an event you have fun at) shenanigans.Mistakes like these often hide in accessibility labels, and are hence far more obvious to screen reader users. In normal UI, they're usually found quickly enough that users never notice, but accessibility labels are often overlooked when testing translations.
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  once_inc
  I've had a similar experience where Dutch surnames were translated from English to Dutch by Excel for some reason. Since many Dutchman have a surname prefixed with the Dutch word "van" (which means "of") Excel dutifully translated it to "Busje", which meant that many of our clients suddenly were called "Lieke Busje Lexmond" or "Vincent Busje Gogh".It got a chuckle from our marketing department which caught the error before badges were printed for the very high-profile event we had planned for the next day.
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  frnx
  I'm wondering where the "forks" translation came from in the first place. Google Translate used to be fairly reliable for simple translations, but I've seen several examples in the last couple of years where it goes batshit crazy, including starting to loop hallucinating sentences on repeat. Is absolutely nobody checking how well it performs before deploying nowadays?
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  Dylan16807
  "our vendor now matches the lightbox scripting to the language of the text on the webpage""The auto-translate pop-up may still be triggered on occasion, but the HTML in the survey wrapper prevents it from changing the content on the webpage."I have no idea what either of these sentences mean, and they're both very important to the fix.
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  mschuster91
  > For some respondents, this prompted their browser to believe our survey was written in a language other than English (even though, again, it was in English) and ask if they wanted the page to be translated to English – or, we think, automatically try to translate the page to English.I goddamn hate this "feature" so much. Especially since it sometimes resets and then I have to find out where the fuck Google moved the disable button to again.No Google, I speak fluent German and English and can reasonably read Croatian - if I wanted a translation I would explicitly ask for it myself thanks.
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  cdelsolar
  I run an app (Aerolith.org) for studying Scrabble words. For years I would get weird bug reports (https://github.com/domino14/Webolith/issues/331), where at the end of each round, when a user viewed the definitions, the words for definitions would get randomly replaced with other unrelated words. I double and triple checked the code; since I had recently moved the word-related logic to a Go microservice I assumed I had some crazy race condition. I remember trying to replicate it with many simultaneous requests, looking for memory leaks, thinking there was something wrong with the sqlite driver, etc.Finally, I figured out that it was a Google Chrome auto-translation issue. For example the word JIBER was replaced with "BECAUSE OF" because JIBER means BECAUSE OF in Kurdish. There were many other similar ridiculous cases.
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  kgeist
  Once, a customer complained that we had corrupted their documents on our platform. Seemingly out of nowhere, words like "Messi" and "Zidane" started appearing countless times in the titles and content of their documents - overnight. It was so bizarre and random. We eventually found out they had a broken browser extension (something similar to Google Translate, I don't remember).I was only able to find a single instance of such a bug elsewhere, on a Microsoft support forum — the guy was furious that Outlook would insert 'Messi' and 'Zidane' into his emails every time he tried to send them. Something very specific seemed to trigger it.
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  withinrafael
  Windows recently had [Compress to postcode] in its context menu for en-GB users.
• epistasis
  Oh this is absolutely delightful, both in how complex the bug is and the actual result.
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  yuliyp
  Last year there was a question in a foreign language on the trivia league LearnedLeague that had to be thrown out because some peoples' browsers ended up translating the question, making it much easier than anticipated for a subset of users, without them opting in or necessarily even being aware of it.
• rkunde
  For years, Chrome would offer to “translate from Danish” if the contents of the page are just “403 Forbidden”.
• koito17
  Earlier today, I found a bug in Discord where one of the login forms in Japanese uses 「はい」 ("Yes") as the label for the "Log in" button. The button in question is right beneath a label stating 「パスワードをお忘れですか」("Forgot password?").X / Twitter is full of funny translations, too. My favorite is 「ポストさんを報告」 (lit. "Report Mr. Post").
• ineedasername
  As a matter of standard practice I use [forks] and [spoons] in otherwise typical yes/no spaces. When results are tallied I simply retcon my yes/no proxy assignments towards whatever result was my target outcome. Publishable outcomes every time. P hacking is a pain and really, why bother when I know the results are… aspirational… regardless?
• kazinator
  I gave this a little bit of thought and here is my best hypothesis.The token "yes", which is not a word in Spanish, might have been tried as "Y es".That in turn being taken as a sentence fragment, meaning "It's a Y". (Spanish isn't verb-final, but let's go with it).The letter Y is a symbol of forking.If something is likened to a Y, that's a way of saying it forks.Anyway, translation tools sometimes do weird things when the input is a sentence fragment or just a word or two.UPDATE:When I type "Y es" into Google translate, tagging it as Spanish, those two tokens still go to "Forks". This adds a little bit of support to my hypothesis.However, "Y e s" also translates to "Forks".Inputs like "A es", "B es", "C es" don't do anything; they go to "A is", "B is", ...Moreover "Y es verde" and "Y e s verde" and "Yes verde" all go to "and it's green".UPDATE:It is false that "yes" is not a Spanish word. The letter Y is called "ye", and the plural of that is "yes". Just like when we say that giggle has "three gees", we are using a plural of the letter name "gee". https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y
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  FabHK
  FWIW, "forks" is "tenedores" in Spanish... not that that illuminates the mystery.
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  banqjls
  Just to be clear, “yes” does not mean “forks” in Spanish.Google translate received a huge update a few months ago and it’s been a complete clusterfuck.
• ben_w
  For a while now, I've had the idea that some malicious person could have a browser extension that detects and modifies news sources to spread propaganda. We've already got joke versions of this, s/{some annoying topic}/{joke} — and for the moment, this is still in the "ha ha what a silly bug" domain.One day, I expect it won't be silly. It'll be some more subtle transformation that rewrites one party, or one person, as having constantly sinister motives.Will we even hear about it, if such a thing comes our way?
• jmercouris
  If you think you understand software, think again. We are building complex machines upon towers of sand!
• perching_aix
  OpenAI uses machine translation for at least ChatGPT's UI, which became apparent to me thanks to a similar swap.Thankfully there's no real way to report it as an issue either that I could find, so it shall remain as a fun stain for people to run into and mock I suppose.
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  baggy_trough
  Changing text on a page is potentially just as bad as the time Xerox changed the numbers on copied blueprints due to compression.
• J8K357R
  Did anyone think to ask Google what’s happening? This can be easily reproduced still and n Google Translate. Strongly suggest that some SDE years ago thought this was an unlikely case that someone would ask to translate the word yes from Spanish to English. Boom fun Easter egg.
• fortran77
  Eventually with AI translation, and the proliferation of machine generated text everywhere, the word "yes" will be the way people say "forks" in Spanish! You would say at a restaurant "Necesitamos dos yes, por favor."
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  turnsout
  So basically Pew is using garbage adware that pops up an intrusive popup that screws up automated language detection, Chrome is way too overeager to auto translate, and Google Translate is starting to go to seed now that everyone uses LLMs.
• xeckr
  This has meme potential. All in favour, raise your forks!
• curtisszmania
  [dead]
• aaron695
  Translate considers "Yes" to be "Ye" in plural form - https://translate.google.com/details?sl=es&tl=en&text=yes&op..."Ye" is the "letter Y" in Spanish.Guessing the next step it looks like a fork in the road.A perfect translate should see English words and not translate, but if you translate "Spanish" to English" after giving it English input undefined should not be unexpected.