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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

This title is confusing in English. It makes it sound like Google is the entity that made the decision not to sponsor, instead of the conference organizers. A better title would be "AI ethics conference organizers no longer want Google as sponsors".

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I did submit it under a completely different title but unfortunately someone changed it to this abomination. I don't know what if anything I can do about it because I also thought it can now be construed as the exact opposite.

I think

   Google declared "persona non grata" as sponsor of AI ethics conference by ACM

was my original title.

"Persona non grata" to me was the best translation of "unerwünscht" in the original German headline. There might have been other options but "wanted" certainly is extremely awkward and ambiguous in comparison. But stuff like that keeps happening on HN, it has certainly been a "known bug" for many years, which sometimes leads me to just not visiting or commenting/submitting for a couple of weeks until I've stopped fuming over the unappealable, authoritative actions by someone who doesn't know their limits... ;-)

I think this pretty much tells me everything I suspected about HN.

HN, in the general case, values civility over decency when the two conflict.

I regard it as a fundamental flaw; your mileage may vary.

I think adding "is" - "Google is no longer wanted..." would be enough

It's confusing because passive voice is used.

No, it's confusing, because the sentence (which isn't actually in the passive voice) is word-by-word identical to another sentence, but with with a totally different meaning. So that many people will parse it as the other sentence.

(The German sentence doesn't have that ambiguity)

I believe whoever changed the headline to this abomination doesn't understand any German - or it was done automatically by something like GPT-3 (wouldn't put it past HN ;-)).

Why? Because it's the exact result that Google Translator spits out if you translate the original page in Chrome ("Google no longer wanted to sponsor the AI ethics conference"). That's of course just plain incorrect on several levels. I put a lot of effort into finding a suitable and exact translation when I originally submitted it but apparently we are now at the point where well-thought-through and correct work can simply be erased and overwritten with the result of a stupid Google AI. How fitting for this topic ;-))

It's not really "incorrect", it's just ambiguous to the point that an average native English speaker would interpret it incorrectly.

The problem is the word "wanted" in that sentence can either signify present tense passive voice (e.g. "Google (is) no longer wanted to sponsor..."), which is actually the desired interpretation here, or past tense active voice (which is how I think most native speakers would interpret it).

In particular, the passive interpretation (omitting "is") is only valid in headlinese, while the active interpretation is valid in ordinary English.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headline#Headlinese

Many English speakers understand headlinese easily, but maybe not so easily when there's a more natural non-headlinese parse of the same phrase!

I'm not a native english speaker but I understood it as; "The conference is no longer accepting the sponsorship by Google" or "The AI ethics research conference (an entity) no longer wants Google (another entity) as their sponsor and suspends them from sponsoring."

How would it be interpreted as being the other way around?

Edit: This is the headline when I read it: "AI ethics research conference suspends Google sponsorship"

I realized that it might have been changed now.

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