I’ve always been curious about why the hell stuff on r/googletranslate comes to be. Sometimes glitches from the translator are so bad that they don’t even match up. You can just type in random letters, and the translator would come up with something random.
Here are some examples of what I’m asking about. Here is probably one of my favorite videos: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-rfBsWmo0M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-rfBsWmo0M)
Some reddit posts: [https://www.reddit.com/r/googletranslate/comments/adaui3/communism_time/](https://www.reddit.com/r/googletranslate/comments/adaui3/communism_time/) (credit to u/QuIgGlEsJiGgLeS**)**
[**https://www.reddit.com/r/googletranslate/comments/ew8zs0/nice/**](https://www.reddit.com/r/googletranslate/comments/ew8zs0/nice/) **(credit to** u/Wolfer7098**)**
So, how the hell does this even happen? I’ve genuinely been thinking about this a lot.
In: Other
To say nothing about implication and context.
Casual Japanese (even formal) will entirely omit both objects and subjects if they are clear from context.
One thing that tends to cause errors is syntax. Not all languages put sentences together in the same format, per se. If the order of a sentence is completely different between languages, some things can become jumbled or lost in translation.
Because languages aren’t perfectly one to one.
For example, take the word kindergarten. An English word, taken from the German language, meaning “a school that teaches young children, typically ages 5-6.”
In Japanese, let’s say, there likely isn’t a word that means exactly the same thing. So instead of just finding an equivalent word, you have to figure out how best to convey the original meaning of the word.
This can happen the other way, too. There is a word in Japanese that means “ones entire reason for getting up in the morning.” I can’t remember it off the top of my head, but it’s a very simple one syllable word. That one syllable carries an entire sentence of meaning, and we don’t have an equivalent word.
Now imagine all of the dozens changes that google will go through when translating across multiple languages, all of them with quirks such as this. And then remember that it’s an algorithm doing things automatically with no human oversight.
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