A simple forks or no question
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A recent achievement of helpful Google AI — Anna Brown, "How a glitch in an online survey replaed the word 'yes' with 'forks'", Decoded 3/21/2025:
At Pew Research Center, we routinely ask the people who take our surveys to give us feedback about their experience. Were the survey questions clear? Were they engaging? Were they politically neutral?
While we get a wide range of feedback on our surveys, we were surprised by a comment we received on an online survey in 2024: “You misspelled YES with FORKS numerous times.”
That comment was soon followed by several others along the same lines:
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- “Please review [the] answer choices. Every ‘yes’ answer for me was listed as ‘forks’ for some reason. I.e. instead of yes/no it was forks/no.”
- “My computer had some difficulty with your answer choices. For example, instead of ‘yes’ for yes or no answers, my display showed ‘forks.’ Weird.”
Observations of this phenomenon has been around for a couple of years, e.g. this r/softwaregore post.
Why did this happen? According to the Decoded post:
First, something in the underlying programming for our 2024 online poll caused web browsers to think that the survey webpage might be in Spanish, even though it was in English. Technically, this was caused by a “lightbox popup,” a design feature that allows ads – or, in our case, survey instructions – to pop up on the page when a respondent clicks a link offering additional survey instructions. Some browsers detect the lightbox popup as containing different languages, triggering a native auto-translation feature. […]
The second problem we discovered is that Google Translate contains a bizarre error. If you tell it that “yes” is a Spanish word, and then ask it to translate “yes” to English, the translation you receive is “forks.”
Google Translate still thinks that "yes" in Spanish means "forks" in English:
That may be puzzling until you realize that ye as the name of the letter 'Y' in Spanish can be used to mean a fork in the road, i.e. a Y-junction.
[h/t Bradley S.]
ktschwarz said,
March 22, 2025 @ 3:36 pm
This isn't Google AI, it's Google Translate, which was unable, as always, to throw back an error saying "the text that you wanted translated from Spanish isn't actually in Spanish" — although given a text consisting only of "Yes", it couldn't even have known that.
I tried to get Google's AI Overview to reproduce the error by typing "translate 'yes' from Spanish to English" in the search bar, but nope, all it would give me was "sí" — answering the wrong question. After that came the GT output with "forks", and then search results, including a dictionary that *correctly* translated "Yes" as "Y's".
VVOV said,
March 22, 2025 @ 6:01 pm
This is extra puzzling in that, in the uncommon situations where this word would actually mean “forks”, I think Spanish speakers would write it as “Ys”, not “yes” — similar to how “crosses” in English might be written as “Xs”, but not “exes”.
For what it’s worth, neither the RAE online dictionary nor Wiktionary has fork / bifurcation listed as a meaning of “Y”, and the native Spanish speaker in my household did not understand how “yes” could mean “forks” even with explanation of the appropriate context. I’m curious what kind of Spanish-English corpora google translate was trained on such that this translation-equivalent was even available to it.
John Swindle said,
March 22, 2025 @ 6:08 pm
Six months ago on the online discussion site Reddit there was a query, since deleted, about the supposedly Spanish word “potoyes.” It turns out to be either a machine mistranslation or sometimes an affectionately joking human translation into English of the“Potosí” in “San Luis Potosí.”
John Swindle said,
March 22, 2025 @ 6:12 pm
As in the Mexican river, state, and beautiful city of that name,