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

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

#51

Post by doubletwoyou »

cryptonector wrote: post #17
frnx wrote: post #5

I'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").

really? i thought that was a latin problem (sic)

doesn’t spanish have sí? or is it something like portuguese where the verb conjugated to an affirmation is preferred over something like sí?

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

#52

Post by jhy »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #27

"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.

My guess (it would be nice if they actually said...) is that they were missing the required lang attribute on their HTML.
If not defined it will default to unknown (not to the user's locale) and so this makes Chrome guess. And there wasn't much text in the lightbox (which might be a different page?) for the browser to infer from.

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

#53

Post by pilaf »

doubletwoyou wrote: post #51
cryptonector wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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").

really? i thought that was a latin problem (sic) doesn’t spanish have sí? or is it something like portuguese where the verb conjugated to an affirmation is preferred over something like sí?

OP meant that "yes" is not a word in Spanish. The word "sí" is indeed the affirmative and it's used mostly the same as yes in English.

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

#54

Post by lmz »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #27

"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.

#1 is probably to subset the loaded lightbox text-localization files to only the survey language. And #2 is to use the translate=no HTML attribute (or its predecessor) to disable translation of that section.

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

#55

Post by climb_stealth »

miki123211 wrote: post #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…

Hah! I fondly remember some Linux distro that had the Desktop translated to a literal table top.

Translating without context must be really tough. Especially with a language like English that is utterly ambiguous.

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

#56

Post by aaron695 »

Translate considers "Yes" to be "Ye" in plural form - https://translate.google.com/details?sl=es&tl=en&text=yes&op...

"Ye" is the "letter Y" in Spanish.

Guessing the next step it looks like a fork in the road.

A perfect translate should see English words and not translate, but if you translate "Spanish" to English" after giving it English input undefined should not be unexpected.

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

#57

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

wat10000 wrote: post #4

Maybe 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…

"I will proceed to type the characters _e_ and _gu_"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-rfBsWmo0M

I never found out what a DECEARING EGG is

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

#58

Post by kgeist »

Once, a customer complained that we had corrupted their documents on our platform. Seemingly out of nowhere, words like "Messi" and "Zidane" started appearing countless times in the titles and content of their documents - overnight. It was so bizarre and random. We eventually found out they had a broken browser extension (something similar to Google Translate, I don't remember).

I was only able to find a single instance of such a bug elsewhere, on a Microsoft support forum — the guy was furious that Outlook would insert 'Messi' and 'Zidane' into his emails every time he tried to send them. Something very specific seemed to trigger it.

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

#60

Post by dreghgh »

once_inc wrote: post #29

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…

French localisation of OnlyFans used to translate the word 'tip' (quite essential to the OF experience) both as 'bout', 'tip' in the sense of 'end', and as 'astuce', 'tip' in the sense of 'piece of advice'.
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