Just how bad is Google Translate?

[yuiyoshida]

I found this phrase, in Japanese and wanted to get the translation: atashi ha kirei na onna no ko de, ribon ga kami ni aru koto ga suki de, onna no ko ha minna wo kisu shitai: あたし は きれい な おんあ の こ で、 りぼん が かみ に ある こと が すき で、 おな の こ は みんあ を きす したい.

What it means in English: "I'm a pretty girl, I like ribbons in my hair and I want to kiss all the girls."

What Google Translate gave me as a translation: I like to have flying ribs in my beautiful girls, I want to grind a horny dog.

That last sentence had me ROFLMAO!

I have found Google Translate works great Translating English to French and back. But English to Japanese and Japanese back to English , not so much. Consider that next time translating Japanese text!

Good Luck! がんばって ください.

[JHan]

1. haha!

Yep, the french isn't so bad.

[Dustlawyer]

2. You should see what it does to Vietnamese!

We used it once to send a letter to our Vietnamese fisherman in the BP oil spill case. Never again! We hired a Vietnamese staff and trained them. It worked so well we now have more Vietnamese going into law in our area, something the community here needed anyway!

[pinboy3niner]

22. Many years ago my Vietnamese roommate taught me an idiom

I still remember the Vietnamese phrase, but I've never seen it written. It means "I know what you are thinking," but my friend's literal translation was "I walk in your stomach with my wooden shoes."

[Bernardo de La Paz]

3. "The wine is strong, the meat is putrid"

In the early days of machine translation (1960s), the phrase "The spirit is willing, the flesh is weak" was translated into a language like French or Russian and translated back, it came back as "The wine is strong, the meat is putrid".

Not as funny as your example!

[War Horse]

4. A good test is to translate it,

then translate it back. Google translate is getting better all the time. It's much, much better than it was only 3-4 years ago.

But the problem with all machine translation is context, and you will often get literal translations. And translations between different language groups (e.g. Germanic to Germanic v.s., say, Latin to Slavic) is naturally more difficult.

It's getting better, but we human translators won't be out of work in the immediate future.

[MineralMan]

5. Google Translate should only be used if you

know the other language fairly well. Back-translation can help, too. Most important, though, is to use simple sentences, common words, and avoid idiomatic expressions in the original language you want to be translated into another language.

Also, avoid contractions in English. Just write very simply. If a sentence includes several clauses, break it up into separate sentences. For example, you might get a different result if you rewrote your original phrase this way:

"I am a pretty girl. I like to put ribbons in my hair. I want to kiss all of the girls."

That would probably be translated much better. I can't test that, though, because I don't know Japanese.

Even so, if you don't know the target language yourself, you're taking a risk of being misunderstood if you use Google Translate.

[treestar]

6. Lots of words in Spanish it just doesn't know

the translation just repeats the word.

[LeftInTX]

15. It doesn't even get gender correct when translating from Spanish

Duh...........

It translates "ella" as "he"

[Ligyron]

7. LOL of the day so far

How did it manage to get a horny dog into the picture I wonder?

and now: how am I supposed to get that image out of my mind?

[List left]

8. It is just as bad at translating Chinese nt

[bigtree]

9. I got something slightly different

I like to have flying ribs in my beautiful girlfriend, and I want to grab a horse mackerel.

[LisaL]

23. I got a similar thing.

I like to have ripples in the bed of beautiful girls, I want to grab a horse mackerel.

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

26. Maybe that's what tRump MEANT to say?!

[War Horse]

10. visitusa.com used machine translation at first

I used to work for a huge multinational translation agency, and they sent their machine translated website to us for a "clean up". The result was people laughing so hard in our offices around the world that they could hardly breathe.

Van Morrison was translated as "van", as in the vehicle. Palm trees was translated as "palm", as in the palm of your hand. But the coup de grâce was when people were adviced to "pet the wild alligators in Florida"...

[RedWedge]

11. And if you remove all the spaces:

"I would like to have a daughter husband in a clean dumplings like to have flying ribs."

[panader0]

12. The next time someone makes me mad, I will tell them to

Go grind a horny dog!

[NewJeffCT]

13. Chinese translations are as bad as Japanese

from what my wife and other Chinese people tell me.

[Feeling the Bern]

14. I speak and live in China. My wife is Chinese.

It's bad. It's right about 85% of the time if you keep sentences short. But if not, it sucks.

[MNdemJedi]

16. Sorry, but I call BS on the original poster

I finally got around to creating a DU account just so I could post this. I'm a localization industry professional (no, I don't work for Google or anything like that), and a Japanese speaker.

Given the original input:
私は綺麗な女の子で、リボンが髪にあることが好きで、女の子は皆をキスしたい。
These are the results:
I am a beautiful girl, I like having ribbons in my hair, girls want to kiss everyone.

Nothing about grinding dogs (although I do love that expression). Japanese is a language where one doesn't always state the "who" part, it is deduced from context (if not present). So Google makes a reasonable assumption about who is doing the kissing. It doesn't happen to match the original sentence, but the original sentence is not exactly written for comprehension and clarity. If you took the last phrase out by itself, I think 95% of Japanese people would say it means exactly what Google thought it meant.

If you tweak one character in the original sentence:
私は綺麗な女の子で、リボンが髪にあることが好きで、女の子の皆をキスしたい。

These are the results Google returns:
I am a beautiful girl, I like to have a ribbon in my hair, I want to kiss every girl.

I use Google translate on a pretty regular basis, and while it's Japanese translation used to be horrible, it upgraded to something they call Google Brain a few months ago. The results are quite amazing, frankly. If you want to learn more, and not just repeat misinformation, see the NYTimes article from a couple weeks ago. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html?_r=0

[Fast Walker 52]

18. welcome to DU!

Good first post!

Personally, I love google translate.

[betsuni]

21. i agree with you.

[yuiyoshida]

25. DU Youkoso, Irasshaimase MNdemJedi-san

Actually That IS THE Way it came out, I didn't make up the part about the horny dog, that's why it made me laugh so hard. It was random, as other people have tested, and came out with other results.

Your sentence worked out very well. I am sort of proficient at Japanese, having had four or five years of it off campus at Cal Berkeley. My Parents are Japanese and Hawaiian native and don't even know their native language. That's what happens when people come to America and end up never using their Japanese and fail to teach their children.

I live in San Francisco in a heavily Chinese Neighborhood where Cantonese is dominate over Mandarin. Most of my former School mates always spoke English and Cantonese, because the neighborhood was mostly Chinese. They had a great excuse to keep their language and teach it to their kids, unlike my parents, who never learned it from their parents. I felt like I had to take a course in Japanese, so I could have a second language. I always wanted a second language and at first started taking Tagalog, but, when I found out there were classes on Japanese, I jumped on it and enrolled. Its unfortunate, that I never got to finish due to financial problems, the prices rose, and my income shrank. So now I have my real Japanese friends (who live in Japan) help me, though I really would love a tutor. I suppose I could find one, here in SF, but My income is still tight.

書がない

ども ありがとう ございました。 ほんと に

If you are interested, come visit the Asian group:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=forum&id=1250

[ileus]

17. OK Google

[awoke_in_2003]

19. "I want to grind a horny dog"

Typical Saturday night at the awoke household

[jmowreader]

20. I just tried it myself

I got this:

"I like fond of ripples in the garden of the beautiful girls, I want to kick off the noodles."

[redwitch]

24. I love reading the translations of my friend Satomis posts.

They rarely make any sense at all and it is indeed hilarious!