OT: Machine translations

[John Rumm]

One of the oddities of receiving email addresses to the editor at the diyfaq is one gets a number of Chinese companies writing in slightly dodgy English attempting to flog me bulk loads of various widgets...

Got one today, that this time included no English text at all. So out of curiosity I pasted into google translate.

I will have a pint of whatever this guy was on:

"Wei layer enemy powder curtain fork eclipse the fine Monkey foil antelope Oh said Jin Peng is issued the Kom only instigate the attack San roundabout and heart marriage Cheng the halogen Gong trouble Cang prison King chord Hong Kong Secretary for one hundred partners Tian Zhejiang stalls convex allowed to the female fence pray overflow apartment

Production from the U.S. West _ who you 36 hours arbitrary erectile.

Buried Lin the solid milk significantly Ying decline roundworm law row Kazakhstan reminder letter training crazy chatter Kang Lung silent commandment shall take the broom sale picking refused to feed both Kuang paternity iridium coax lemon also bladder next to co-operate Britain

Gospel the West force members with disabilities authentic stores for the majority of men. Zhaomengdaolun Fuhuwuhua Free

Interested in obtaining details visit here Tips: cash on delivery, shopping at ease Cameroon hydrocarbon tert onions efforts ounces mandarin duck Do not ammonia ginger shout burst shrimp qualitative Korea Jian Yong bath split stack Bin bundle wrapped in cloth A aldehyde clarity Ha oxygen the the Kei ripple wife frozen bundle off"

[polygonum]

Past few days I have been doing translated searches re a rare medical condition. I can manage the French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, and some others - the machine translation makes sense. But when it gets onto Chinese I struggle to get individual phrases that make much sense - let alone whole sentences or, wishful thinking here, paragraphs.

"intrinsic toxic heat the ferrite yang (or yin), complex due to the the cold pathogen-off limbs context, hot is cold Yu, falling into cold from hot, into the blood of evil heat, heat toxin obstruct poly, context closure resistance, blood runs sluggish and cause burning pain."

[Brian Gaff]

I think I heard that bloke on a shopping channel the other day, on the other hand he might have just been from Scotland.

Brian

[Davey]

snip

It could be that Google Translate just threw in the towel after the first sentence, and then made stuff up from that point on.

I was once given a restaurant menu in Tijuana, Mexico, which had several dishes served with "Come white" sauce. I chose something different.

[Frank Erskine]

Chance'd be a fine thing...

;-)

[mike]

=BD=C7=CF=F2=C4=A5=B9=E2=BB=FA

[Brian Gaff]

Yes, well the one thing machines lack is any sense of the ridiculous so it has no way to know what its actually doing in the target language. If this is the same mob I sometimes get then the mob actually sell chemicals for making 'stuff' by which i mean it seems to be for plastics or similar, but even in the English its pretty much a mess, as their English is way different to mine. Brian

[PeterC]

If the word "Choogle" hasn't been taken for anything else, perhaps it could be used for Google tranlation from Chinese into er, Chooglish.

[PeterC]

You're right there, Brian - for some while I wondered why so many BBC programmes seemed to be presented by dysfunctional foreigners with speech impediments, then I realised that some of the presenters were Scottish. There seems to be a competition to find the most strangulated enunciation possible. Daft thing is, after a while I can understand it OK, same as when I go to an area with a strong accent and need a day or two to tune in.

[Windmill]

[...............much more of same deleted]

If Chinese instruction manual writers rely on similar translation methods, all is explained.

The manual^H^Hleaflet for a cheap mobile phone seemed to be hinting about sex education at one point!

[Windmill]

I spent what are alleged to be one's most formative years in a small mining village (safe from the bombs that didn't fall on nearby Edinburgh) and thought I could understand broad Scots. But some of what I hear today is almost incomprehensible to me. I suppose accents mutate with the passage of time.

[Nightjar]

:-)

Colin Bignell

[Owain]

That's so bad I wonder if something went wrong with the character encoding and the double-byte characters are a byte off. Sort of ROT13 in Chinese ...

Roundtripping the above through Google Translate gives:

This is so bad, I do not know, if there is a wrong character encoding and double-byte characters a byte Close. Sort ROT13 in China ...

which is intelligible, if not quite understandable.

Owain

[Java Jive]

[Huge]

I spent some year running SYSTRAN and ALPS machine translation systems for a previous employer. Never saw anything as bad as that, though.

[Huge]

*applause*

[Theo Markettos]

I was wondering if it was a sp@m-fi1t3r av0!d@nce technique - choose pictograms that look roughly the same as the real ones so a Chinese speaker can get the gist but they won't be on the spam filter's blacklist.

Theo

[Dave Liquorice]

What did you tell it the source langauge was? Cantonese of Mandarin?

[djc]

No difference in the written form

[John Rumm]

I did wonder if it was following the trick that some spammers use to include random text that makes no sense, but sort of follows the rules of language so as to slip past the spam filters... but then that makes little sense since there was nothing else attached that did make sense!