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Comment by shutupalready | Hacker News Reader

Looking at that piece of Latin->English translation, the word "United States" caught my attention. How did it get there?

I tried to narrow it down. This is the minimal phrase that gives "United States":

https://translate.google.com/#la/en/Duis%20gravida%20orci%20....

Obviously it's an error, but what specifically makes you go from:

Duis gravida orci in quam tempor.

to:

Designers in the film which, unlike in the United States.

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That's what statistical translation algorithms do - form associations between source and target text. How did "United States" get there? Because it was trained on a Latin/English phrase that contained "United States" in the English and probably something completely different in the Latin version, and the algorithm decided that would be the best match.

Curiously, it translates to "It's a child in a candy" on my google translate session.

The presence or absence of period is enough for Google Translate to create entirely different translations!

My link above doesn't have a period at the end. HackerNews cuts off the period from the end of the URL it seems.

So clicking on this link,

https://translate.google.com/#la/en/Duis%20gravida%20orci%20...

gives It's a child in a candy, but if you then manually add a period to the end of the sentence, you'll get, Designers in the film which, unlike in the United States.

omg, that's hilarious!

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