Jenny Art

Hey Product Hunters, We launched our product yesterday and received many comments about machine translation vs. human translation: https://www.producthunt.com/post... It's a topic that fascinates me and I've been collecting fun machine translation failures for a long time, let me share with you some of my faves I speak some Mandarin Chinese and that's a great language for machine translation failures 1. There is this Chinese set phrase (= to be jealous; literally to eat vinegar ), and machine translation gets it right. But if we use this phrase in a sentence Oops! This awkward moment when Are you still jealous of your ex? turns into Will you still eat the vinegar of his ex-girlfriend? 2. Another Chinese to English translation example (sorry, didn't keep the Chinese version, but I do have the Google translate screenshot): I hope you ll be beautiful in the future . Lol what? The original Chinese phrase said I hope you ll have a great ( beautiful ) future . 3. One of the key problems is that machine translation often doesn't get the context. It becomes especially serious if you translate standalone words (like UI or other short strings of text). In one of translations there was a single word wasted. It was a game context, so apparently it would mean "killed", but it could also mean "spent in vain", "drunk" and many other things. A human translator can assume the correct meaning based on other strings of this translation, or simply ask you for more details - but the machine won't. It will go for the most common version - in this case, it will be "spent". 4. Another one was when I had an article about games translated from English into Turkish - by a native speaker. I ran the finished translation through Google Translate to check stuff like links and figures in place. And I came across this: "( te bu nedenle,) oyun geli tiricileri i in yerelle tirme s recini olabildi ince ba a r tmayan bir i haline getirebilmek ad na, (tasar m s recinin en ba ndan itibaren uygulanabilecek bir tak m kurallar i eren bu listeyi haz rlad k.)" - Google Translate said "...in order to make the localization process as a headache as possible for game developers". (WAIT, WHAT??) The Turkish version actually means less troublesome as much as possible, less of a headache as much as possible , but Google translate was telling me the opposite Please share your opinion and favorite machine translation mistakes in the comments! Also, it would be great to hear your feedback about our human translation platform: https://www.producthunt.com/post... Thanks!