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

pewresearch.org

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

#61

Post by kazinator »

jwrallie wrote: post #50
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.

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”.

Perhaps the article needs to be read as if prefixed with:

"I was asked to write the following explanation for the public, to put on our website, and talked to the programmers. I have idea what they were saying. I took some notes, which likewise mean nothing to me, but here goes ..."

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

#62

Post by ineedasername »

As a matter of standard practice I use [forks] and [spoons] in otherwise typical yes/no spaces. When results are tallied I simply retcon my yes/no proxy assignments towards whatever result was my target outcome. Publishable outcomes every time. P hacking is a pain and really, why bother when I know the results are… aspirational… regardless?

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

#64

Post by syndeo »

cperciva wrote: post #44
yongjik wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be fair, if they don't, no one else will!

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

#65

Post by qsi »

bigiain wrote: post #48
kimos wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That would be a poffer, as the interstitial t is added to words ending in r when forming the diminutive.

And no, I didn't know what a poffer was either. :)

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

#66

Post by dylan604 »

kgeist wrote: post #58

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 insta…

> Something very specific seemed to trigger it.

Being not a fan of La Liga???

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

#67

Post by koito17 »

Earlier today, I found a bug in Discord where one of the login forms in Japanese uses 「はい」 ("Yes") as the label for the "Log in" button. The button in question is right beneath a label stating 「パスワードをお忘れですか」("Forgot password?").

X / Twitter is full of funny translations, too. My favorite is 「ポストさんを報告」 (lit. "Report Mr. Post").

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

#69

Post by Heliodex »

tgv wrote: post #9
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…

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.

An interesting occurrence I've seen is with flag emojis, for example translating some English text with an England/UK/US flag after it will sometimes turn the flag into that of a different country where the language of the translated text is spoken.

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

#70

Post by J8K357R »

Did anyone think to ask Google what’s happening? This can be easily reproduced still and n Google Translate. Strongly suggest that some SDE years ago thought this was an unlikely case that someone would ask to translate the word yes from Spanish to English. Boom fun Easter egg.
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