Google Translate Mistakes

October 13, 2008 on 7:14 pm | In Culture | | Email This Post

Ever use Google Translate to exchange messages with a Japanese friend?

You might want to be a bit more careful next time…

Look at how it translated the following…

「バスの乗客にけがはなかった。」

Google translation…

“The bus passengers were injured in the incident.”

Correct translation…

“No passengers were injured.” Literal translation would be something like… “There were none injured among the bus passengers.”

The difference is like night and day!

- Harvey

Related Posts... (in theory)   Using Google as a Japanese English Translation Tool Tips    Learning with Google Images    Checking your Japanese-English Translations with Google Fight  

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5 Comments »

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  1. Gravatar

    Hi Harvey,

    Google Translate is notoriously bad for Japanese. At this stage, it seems that Infoseek and Excite are much better.

    Comment by Chris — October 14, 2008 #

  2. Gravatar

    It doesn’t help that people can submit “corrections” to incorrect translations of words and phrases when you use google to translate a website. I once tried to translate a singer’s page. It translated her name as “TLC” and her song as “No Scrubs”! When you use google, artists turn into other artists!

    Comment by Bri — October 14, 2008 #

  3. Gravatar

    Hi,

    I am a Chairman of THE EAST Business Newspaper in the UK.
    Is there any chance we could publish your articles in our paper and reintroduce them on our website, of course, with your full credit?

    Many thanks and kind regards,

    Hyung Wook Lee
    Chairman / Editor in Chief
    MBA(Edin)

    THE EAST, The East Asian Monthly Business Newspaper,
    Elephant Consulting Limited, 160 Central Road, Worcester Park, Surrey, KT4 8HQ, UK
    Tel : + 44 (0) 7912 608 321 / Web site: http://www.theeast.org / E mail : info@theeast.org
    Registered in England & Wales, Company No. 6254454

    Comment by hyung lee — October 16, 2008 #

  4. Gravatar

    Hi Harvey -

    Long time … Loving the Casio still. You know what is funny about that, … I was playing with the sentence through the link and if you remove the bus passengers バスの乗客に … it gets the negative right, and if you play with the present/past: ない vs なかった, it can bounce back and forth in polarity.

    Pretty weird, but being a programmer myself, I am all to aware of the power of the bug.

    Cheers (from NYC, Tokyo in 2 weeks again)

    Rich

    Comment by リチャード — October 18, 2008 #

  5. Gravatar

    Great stuff. I was about to say someone should make a website just about computer Japanese translations… but then I saw Chris’ link (http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Ozy/20080916). :)

    Comment by Clay — October 29, 2008 #

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