So basically Pew is using garbage adware that pops up an intrusive popup that screws up automated language detection, Chrome is way too overeager to auto translate, and Google Translate is starting to go to seed now that everyone uses LLMs.
A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
11–20 of 102 posts
Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
#12Just to be clear, “yes” does not mean “forks” in Spanish.
Google translate received a huge update a few months ago and it’s been a complete clusterfuck.
Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
#13Maybe twenty years ago, Google Translate had a fun bug with the word "amistad." In Spanish->English mode, it would correctly translate this to "friendship." If you added an exclamation mark, it would translate with the exclamation mark, so "amistad!" became "friendship!" If you added more, it would add to the translation, so "amistad!!!" became "friendship!!!" Except if you used exactly five exclamation marks, no mor…
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.
Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
#14Just to be clear, “yes” does not mean “forks” in Spanish. Google translate received a huge update a few months ago and it’s been a complete clusterfuck.
Si
Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
#15FWIW, "forks" is "tenedores" in Spanish... not that that illuminates the mystery.
Yes also means "Y"s in some dialects of Spanish, like the plural of the letter Y. Maybe since the Y looks like a fork there must be some bizarre neural network connection there?
It's not unheard-of for English speakers to use it that way — "I was driving down the road and came to a Y", meaning a fork or branch.
Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
#16Last year there was a question in a foreign language on the trivia league LearnedLeague that had to be thrown out because some peoples' browsers ended up translating the question, making it much easier than anticipated for a subset of users, without them opting in or necessarily even being aware of it.
Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
#17I'm wondering where the "forks" translation came from in the first place. Google Translate used to be fairly reliable for simple translations, but I've seen several examples in the last couple of years where it goes batshit crazy, including starting to loop hallucinating sentences on repeat. Is absolutely nobody checking how well it performs before deploying nowadays?
There is no "yes" in Spanish.
Reminds me of Inodoro Pereira, a comic strip character in Argentina who was a peon in the countryside and rather ignorant, and he'd sometimes respond affirmatively with "yes como dijo un tal Chespier" ("Yes, as some Shaespier once said").
Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
#18> 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 the disable button to again.
No Google, I speak fluent German and English and can reasonably read Croatian - if I wanted a translation I would explicitly ask for it myself thanks.
Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
#19So basically Pew is using garbage adware that pops up an intrusive popup that screws up automated language detection, Chrome is way too overeager to auto translate, and Google Translate is starting to go to seed now that everyone uses LLMs.
The article says the popup which caused this issue was used to display survey instructions, not ads.
Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
#20Just to be clear, “yes” does not mean “forks” in Spanish. Google translate received a huge update a few months ago and it’s been a complete clusterfuck.
It does correctly change “cuatro candelas” to “fork handles”