IT with Passion

Since yesterday there have been many posts in the Google Translate Google group complaining about how Google translated the English word “Israel will” to Arabic “إن إسرائيل لن” which mean “Israel will not” which is exactly the opposite of the word being translated!

Now this seems to be affecting only English to Arabic translation, but not English to French for example or English to Urdu, etc…

This is definitely manipulated because when the sentence is preceded with single quote it produces the right translation, but with double quote it doesn’t, plus why is it just Israel that doesn’t translate correctly to Arabic?, I smell something here!First when the issue was reported and a few people complained on the Google Translate group, Google immediately fixed the issue for plain sentences, however at the time of writing this it still seems to be broken for words with double quotes i.e. “Israel will …Now this too specific to just be an oddity, it seems that someone at Google is actually manipulating this. Also strange enough the Google Translate group (new interface) kept displaying an error when I tried to reply or post on the group, the error message was ‘An error occurred while communicating with the server. Please try again’. The actual HTTP error message was a 500 Internal Server Error with the following on the response ‘The call failed on the server; see server log for details’.I tried a number of other Google groups and they were fine!!, Google what is going on?How odd!, anyway I managed to get onto the group and post to it through the old Groups interface, steps as follows:

1. Logout of your Google account

2. Go to (https://groups.google.com/group/google-translate?lnk=srg&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&safe=off)

3. Alternatively go to the Google groups homepage and search for ‘Google Translate’, once the search results are displayed click on the first link.

4. This will take you to the old Groups interface, on the right hand side click the ‘Join this group’

5. Login to Google, this will forward you to choose a nickname

6. After you have chosen a nickname and you are forwarded back to the old interface for the group.

7. Now click the ‘new post’ button and you are off.

Now leave Google a message to ask them just how credible is their translation and for them to fix it. Google should also discipline employee for playing with the system.

Google  always claimed that there is no capability to manually control many of its algorithms, but the recent Bing sting experiment by Google actually proved that Google can control many things, one of which is search results. This is a big problem, such unlimited control on the hands of the wrong employees and we have an ‘Enemy of the state’ or a ‘Skynet’ situation. Just how safe is our details and data (Email, documents, latitude, etc…) with Google?

This entry was posted on Friday, February 18th, 2011 at 11:13 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.