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A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'

pewresearch.org

41–50 of 102 posts

Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'

#41

> For some respondents, this prompted their browser to believe our survey was written in a language other than English (even though, again, it was in English) and ask if they wanted the page to be translated to English – or, we think, automatically try to translate the page to English. I goddamn hate this "feature" so much. Especially since it sometimes resets and then I have to find out where the fuck Google moved t…

You're going to love YouTube automatically translating video titles to your geo-ip language... For the next project-manager-promotion-worthy feature, they also do auto-dubbing of the speech now!

They now sometimes dub the audio track. The result is about as horrible as one would imagine. Whoever decided to turn this on by default clearly didn't give a damn.

Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'

#42

I've had a similar experience where Dutch surnames were translated from English to Dutch by Excel for some reason. Since many Dutchman have a surname prefixed with the Dutch word "van" (which means "of") Excel dutifully translated it to "Busje", which meant that many of our clients suddenly were called "Lieke Busje Lexmond" or "Vincent Busje Gogh". It got a chuckle from our marketing department which caught the error…

My favourite part of the Dutch language is how it adds the -je diminutive to other words to make new words. A van? That’s just like a cute baby bus.

Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'

#43
I think I have a better one.

I was trying to download some software from a Japanese website (this was about 10 yrs ago I think). There was an entire survey you had to fill out first. Since I speak no Japanese, I naturally used Google Translate (to Polish, not even to English).

That survey had a "gender" field, and the options were something like "person" and "woman".

Then there are the automatic (mis)translations of button labels and other similar strings in software, where the translating tool often only has a single and ambiguous word to go on, with no context whatsoever.

THe funniest ones I've seen are "branch" (satellite office) versus "branch" (of a tree), "book" (a flight) versus "book" (something you read), "character" (ASCII or Unicode) versus "character" (in a story), "clear" (to remove all) versus "clear" (translated as "cloudless", referring to the sky), "letters" (delivered by a postman) versus "letters" (and not digits), "rate" (how fast. i.e. speech rate) versus "rate" (how much you charge per minute), "prune" (remove all) versus "prune" (dried plum), "manual" (and not automatic) versus "manual" (a user manual), "clubs" (places you go to) versus "clubs" (and not diamonds or spades, "queen of clubs" hav a particularly interesting meaning here), "number" (that you call) versus "number" (of things), "at" (@) versus at (home), "tab" (key) versus "tab" (in a browser), "close" (to me) versus "close" (something), "back" (button) versus "back" (a body part), as well as all the "party" (adventuring team in an RPG) versus "party" (legal entity, i.e. "third party") versus "party" (as in an event you have fun at) shenanigans.

Mistakes like these often hide in accessibility labels, and are hence far more obvious to screen reader users. In normal UI, they're usually found quickly enough that users never notice, but accessibility labels are often overlooked when testing translations.

Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'

#44
post #13
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably around that time, Google once translated "Berlin" with "Paris" or something like that. IIRC, it was in a sentence about head offices. The training materials consisted of parallel documents, including manuals, where the German document would say "contact our head office in Berlin", and the French one "contact our head office in Paris." So it learned to translate capitals in certain contexts.

Similarly, there was a time when Google translated "Japan" in Japanese to "Korea" in Korean... because documents scraped from the web would say "Japan and Korea" in Japanese and "Korea and Japan" in Korean.

Common with international treaties. The trade agreement known as USMCA in the USA is known as CUSMA in Canada and T-MEC (Treaty between Mexico, USA, and Canada) in Mexico. Countries almost always put themselves first.

Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'

#46
OpenAI uses machine translation for at least ChatGPT's UI, which became apparent to me thanks to a similar swap.

Thankfully there's no real way to report it as an issue either that I could find, so it shall remain as a fun stain for people to run into and mock I suppose.

Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'

#48
post #42

I've had a similar experience where Dutch surnames were translated from English to Dutch by Excel for some reason. Since many Dutchman have a surname prefixed with the Dutch word "van" (which means "of") Excel dutifully translated it to "Busje", which meant that many of our clients suddenly were called "Lieke Busje Lexmond" or "Vincent Busje Gogh". It got a chuckle from our marketing department which caught the error…

My favourite part of the Dutch language is how it adds the -je diminutive to other words to make new words. A van? That’s just like a cute baby bus.

This made me wonder what a poffert is, if a poffertje is a cute baby version of them. So I Googled it. Sure enough, it's a cake.

Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'

#50

"our vendor now matches the lightbox scripting to the language of the text on the webpage" "The auto-translate pop-up may still be triggered on occasion, but the HTML in the survey wrapper prevents it from changing the content on the webpage." I have no idea what either of these sentences mean, and they're both very important to the fix.

I also got disappointed when they skipped how they actually detected it with just:

> With a little more experimenting, we were able to identify translation as the root of the issue.

Maybe it’s just me but I was really curious to what finally pointed out the issue but all I got was “experiments”.

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