What are some funny machine translations you've come across? I'll start: eldest uncle (大姨夫) was translated as "big daddy"
I read a lot of novels set in ancient China. Often, I come across references to "the King of England". This always drives me nuts, because there's no England yet! And why is the King of England Chinese?! Does Prince William know that he's Chinese? Finally, I broke down and made my fiance translate it for me. (He seriously hates it when I do this.) It means King of Ying.
I don't read MTL, but I'll occasionally spot check translations and the same errors will come through. My pick is "quick wear" for "快穿". I'm not sure how this still shows up in translations because it actually means "quick transmigration", and it a term that everyone is already familiar with. But still we see "quick wear" all the time, and it always looks stupid. Not only is the translation incorrect but "quick wear" doesn't even mean anything in English? So how does this still happen?
I can't remember anything specific but I find it funny when names gets translated to their literal meanings.
the classic "bread bread bread" from hentai story on jp~ don't get me wrong this cat know "pan pan pan" do mean "bread bread bread" to certain extent but it still funny! still this cat favorite is slang~ GRASS! isn't it just slang to say fakku? but imagine this scenario~ "which kind of green onion are you?!" "Grass!" passerby just think 666 me the reader : 555 the heck they talking about? grandfather looking at phone on subway.jpg as mtl reader there bunch of funny stuff if ya can handle the headache
I wonder if they just rotate? There's no rhyme or reason. Recently, I saw another strange one from Google translate. It happens occasionally. All of the books I read are set in ancient China, but one city is often called "Kyoto.". I'm guessing it's supposed to be the capital city, but can't say for sure.
Randomly rotating pronouns is my theory too. The Chinese word for Kyoto can also just mean "capital city" of any country, which makes it a popular choice for novels. In historical novels, it's often a random not-real dynasty, so there's no way to know where the capital was during that fictional time in history. For modern novels, avoiding real place names is popular as a way to avoid the censor, and make the novel more general and less likely to become out-dated, and keeps readers from nitpicking/fact-checking.
it's not a mystery, really. That's because MTL doesn't know how to use context in most cases and has no idea what name belongs to which gender. And on top of it many Asian languages do not have a gender references in the sentences. So it makes a guess, and often gets it wrong. Current MTL is just statistical guessing of the translation, that's why it's so bad.
Sort of. Chinese has 3 singular pronouns, all of which are pronounced the same 他，她，它 (tā). 它 is a neutral word for objects, best translated as "it". 她 is a female word for people (and sometimes pets), best translated as "she". 他 is a neutral word for people, which could be translated as he, she, or singular they. So Chinese sometimes does have a gender reference, and the computer still gets it wrong. That said, you are right it's a statistical guessing game.
With Chinese there is an additional difficulty of phrases not having spaces between words, so even if there is a pronoun, the computer won't really know for sure if it's a pronoun or is a part of another word. Although, I don't know this for certain if it's in Chinese or not since I don't really know the language, but there are many situation where you would have "cat" and "he" pronoun for the cat or some sword with a female name. In these cases the MTL will be more confused what to use and can disregard the actual pronoun if it's in the sentence and replace it with something else.
I should've taken screen shots but more than once I've seen smutty noises be translated into "Iced Coffee" & "Spatula" respectively. Everytime I see it, I crack up
It's especially funny when two guys are fighting, and one guy suddenly said to the other guy angrily, "you think I'm vegetarian!?"
初一 means both the first day of the Lunar New Year, and also the first year of junior middle school. It's hilarious when those get mixed up, especially in ancient novels.
"Xie Lian couldn't help but ate several yuan". 块 (kuai) means piece, but it's also slang for yuan, just like "buck" is slang for dollar. In this case, MTL has overcorrected - she's actually eating pieces of cake, not yuan.