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Have you tried the Google Translate app on your phone? It has a camera tool that automatically translates text that you point it to, but it looks like it needs some work for Mandarin…

I tried to translate a bag of chinese rice crackers using google translate and these are some of the ingredients it gave me pic.twitter.com/cWIghhrWOs

— Claire!!!!!!! (@awkwardfoxes) February 10, 2021

Here's the list of ingredients in Chinese and properly translated into English:  

these are the ingredients and yeah I think it just mistook certain characters for other ones a lot lol pic.twitter.com/dvLMIQk9R3

— Claire!!!!!!! (@awkwardfoxes) February 11, 2021

I won't go through all of the mistranslations one by one, but will only point out a few representative examples:

1. what gets translated as "sand" comes from "bái shātáng 白砂糖" ("white granulated sugar"), which does occur twice — the second time it recognized "bái 白" ("white") as "zì 自" ("self")

2. "zhīmayóu 芝麻油" ("sesame oil") does occur once, but not four times in succession

3. "kànghuàixiěsuān 抗壞血酸" ("ascorbic acid") comes out as "[Anti-Blood]"

4. "disodium guanylate" ("niǎogānsuānèrnà 鳥苷酸二鈉"), which occurs twice, seems to have been rendered as "Bird City"  

5. "sè 色" ("color") comes out as "Sexual"

6. "réngōng 人工" ("artificial; manmade") usually comes out as "human"

7. "horse" comes from the word for "potato" ("mǎlíngshǔ 馬鈴薯" [lit., "horse-bell-yam"], a southern areal term whose etymology is contested)

If I spent a lot more time, I could probably figure how most of the mistranslations arose, but it's a thankless task, because the order of the items in the Twitter post is scrambled and many of the items are truncated or repeated.

More commentary in the Twitter thread.  

 

Selected readings

• "A Japanese-French Google Translate mixup" (7/13/20)
• "More Google Translate hallucinations on YouTube" (6/3/18)
• "Google Translate sabotage" (6/14/19)
• "The elegance of Google Translate" (3/10/18)
• "The wonders of Google Translate" (9/22/17)
• "Don't blame Google Translate" (2/4/18)
• "Google Translate is even better now" (9/27/16)
• "Google is scary good" (7/31/17)
• "Can't find on Google" (8/12/14)
• "Google Translate Sabotage, part 2" (1/17/21)

[Thanks to Ben Zimmer]

February 12, 2021 @ 9:30 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Artificial intelligence, Language and food, Lost in translation

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