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Comment by dmethvin | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of that bug back in 2007 when Google translate would take "sarkozy is chirac" and translate it into "Bush is classless" or other completely different text.

http://www.globalnerdy.com/2007/10/23/google-translates-stra...

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This is probably just an artifact of how Google Translate works. It uses statistics to see corresponding terms and presumes that that's how it's translated. Sarkozy used to be president of France, Bush of USA. What was probably happening was that the phrase "President Bush" was being matched up against "président Sarkozy". So it figures out "President" in French is "président" (correct) and "Bush" in French is "Sarkozy" (incorrect).

Sometimes "Baile Átha Cliath" (the Irish for "Dublin", the capital city of Ireland) gets translated as "London" (the capital of the UK). This is due to Google Translate trying to match up Laws in Ireland (in the Irish language) with UK laws (which would be very similar or potentially based on the same original law). However in the Irish law "Baile Átha Cliath" would be replaced with "London". Here's an example of it: http://translate.google.com/#ga/en/L%C3%A1%20alainn%20inniu%....

My favorite one, since fixed, was translating "amistad" from Spanish to English. It would produce, of course, "friendship". Translate "amistad!" with an exclamation point, and it produced "friendship!" Adding more, "amistad!!" produced "friendship!!" But once you got up to five or so, it suddenly switched and produced "murder!"

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