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Comment by wat10000 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe twenty years ago, Google Translate had a fun bug with the word "amistad." In Spanish->English mode, it would correctly translate this to "friendship." If you added an exclamation mark, it would translate with the exclamation mark, so "amistad!" became "friendship!" If you added more, it would add to the translation, so "amistad!!!" became "friendship!!!" Except if you used exactly five exclamation marks, no more and no less, it would translate "amistad!!!!!" to "murder!"

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Probably around that time, Google once translated "Berlin" with "Paris" or something like that. IIRC, it was in a sentence about head offices. The training materials consisted of parallel documents, including manuals, where the German document would say "contact our head office in Berlin", and the French one "contact our head office in Paris." So it learned to translate capitals in certain contexts.

Similarly, there was a time when Google translated "Japan" in Japanese to "Korea" in Korean... because documents scraped from the web would say "Japan and Korea" in Japanese and "Korea and Japan" in Korean.

I really like this one, it basically learned that "first country" is "this country", and "second country" is the "other country".

Common with international treaties. The trade agreement known as USMCA in the USA is known as CUSMA in Canada and T-MEC (Treaty between Mexico, USA, and Canada) in Mexico. Countries almost always put themselves first.

To be fair, if they don't, no one else will!

https://www.sefaria.org/Pirkei_Avot.1.14?lang=bi

"He used to say, if I am not for myself, who will be for me?"

And NATO is also OTAN, because France insisted on having a French translation of the treaty to be treated equally with English version.

Btw NATO and OTAN being anagrams is a coincidence

is backwards even

Also related and because of the French: UTC. It was chosen as a concession between the logical English CUT or French TUC. Also the two are backwards, which I think is not really a coincidence due to word ordering rules in French.

> Btw NATO and OTAN being anagrams is a coincidence

Not really, many initialisms are mirrors between French and English because their very similar languages in these contexts (same names and same etymology for nouns and adjectives means same letters) and grammatical rules are the opposite of each other (reversed letter order). Eg UN and NU, EU and UE, EEC and CEE, CCP and PCC…

And then, when you can't even agree on dual initialisms, you get UTC.

I've seen something similar, briefly and ages ago now, with it doing the equivalent of* en:"I speak English" -> fr:"Je parle français".

* It might not have been French, I remember the effect not the detail

As Ionesco may have said, the French for London is Paris.

An interesting occurrence I've seen is with flag emojis, for example translating some English text with an England/UK/US flag after it will sometimes turn the flag into that of a different country where the language of the translated text is spoken.

That's Terry Pratchett in action.

https://wiki.lspace.org/Multiple_exclamation_marks

"I will proceed to type the characters _e_ and _gu_"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-rfBsWmo0M

I never found out what a DECEARING EGG is

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