Comments on: Google Translate bug mixes up Heath Ledger, Tom Cruise

The name of the actor, who died tragically on Tuesday, awkwardly comes out as "Tom Cruise" in Google's English-to-Spanish translator.

[cchenoweth6]

Someone found a bug...

Who knew that Google Translate had bugs?? ;)

[rhsc]

the trick is in the timing

had ledger not just died, this story probably would have made a 4chan thread or a topic on the somethingawful boards, but probably no further than that

[billmosby]

Reminds me of Word spell-checker results

I used to use Word for a lot of things at work. It insisted that my
supervisor's name was "ammeter" instead of "Aumeier", and that
the name of a co-worker was "cowgirl" rather than "Cowgill". I
don't remember who it thought Bill Gates or Steve Jobs were.

[Dr_Zinj]

It should be obvious

It would probably return "God the Almighty" for Bill Gates; and either "Allah" or "Zeus" for Steve Jobs.

[jgaskell]

That's the most incredible story I have ever heard!

A spell checker doesn't recognise names and substitutes other words instead? Who would have thought that would happen?

[alegr]

Prank

That's not a bug. Somebody might have entered "community-provided better translation" for the name. This is just a prank.

[soggy0]

Another

It seems to have been fixed. Try "Voy a comer Tom Cruise." instead.

[JBSimmons]

Goggle SEO produces SPAM

I created 2 Google alerts on:
Michael Martin Murphey concerts
Michael Martin Murphey festivals

Google returns XXX rated spam connected with a "gold colored 'My Lexus' car" daily. When will they fix their SEO (search engine optimization) & SEM (search engine marketing) spam? This is truly FUBAR. I have to delete their spam every single day. A national celebrity/recording artist seems to be consistently connected to XXX spam and the car for the last 4 MONTHS.

[JBSimmons]

Correction: Goggle > Google

Sorry for a typo, with CTS, you never know what's going to happen when. I rely HEAVILY on a spell checker too to catch these misfires...

[dianarbiser]

Google Translate is another useless machine

The problem is not the mix-up of the names of the actors, but rather the translation of "miss" for "perder," which doesn't make sense in this context. Good that we still have people translating, instead of machines! :)

[vintermann]

That is what happens with statistical translation. Instead of tired old errors like ungrammatical sentences, Google Translate comes up with entirely new ways of messing up.

No, I don't think this is a prank, either from a Google employee or from a user-suggested translations (if those are used at all, something I've never seen any indication of yet, I'm sure they're washed.) These things just happen. Glitch in the corpus.

Another example: "Jeg snakker norsk" becomes "I speak English". However, "Norsk fotball er kjedelig" still becomes "Norwegian football is boring" :-P

[cocojambosa]

<a href=http://www.picktorrent.com> http://www.picktorrent.com </a>