Changing text on a page is potentially just as bad as the time Xerox changed the numbers on copied blueprints due to compression.
And on copied financial reports.
A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
91–100 of 102 posts
Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
#92As a native Spanish speaker it took me a moment to understand why "yes" was being translated as "forks" until it clicked and it's not an error. In Spanish "Ye" is how we call the letter Y and "La ye" is a word used, at least in the version of Spanish spoken where I come from, to refer to the place where a road forks. Hence the fork in the road is "La ye" and the plural would be "Las yes" or the forks. In this context…
Amazing!
Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
#93I 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…
There was a fun one going around where the title of the game "Watchdogs" had turned into Norwegian for "look at dogs". Re: gender, there's all sorts of chaos going between languages which have no grammatical gender (CJK languages, Finnish etc) and those which have mandatory grammatical gender (Latin languages), because the information may simply not be available in the same sentence. So you get obvious misgenderings…
And then there's the "man" (not a female) versus "man" (as in "human", i.e. "first ,man on the moon" / "all men are created equal").
Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
#94Earlier 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?
The comic strip character was acting all knowledgeable by quoting Shakespeare as saying "yes" when the character meant "sí", but misspelling Shakespeare's name as "Chespier", something like misspelling it "Shaespier" in English.
Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
#95As a native Spanish speaker it took me a moment to understand why "yes" was being translated as "forks" until it clicked and it's not an error. In Spanish "Ye" is how we call the letter Y and "La ye" is a word used, at least in the version of Spanish spoken where I come from, to refer to the place where a road forks. Hence the fork in the road is "La ye" and the plural would be "Las yes" or the forks. In this context…
I am also a native Spanish speaker and I haven't ever heard this. I have always called and heard from every other Spanish speaker the letter Y as i griega (greek i)
Not saying that this is wrong, in fact one can check the Spanish wikipedia to confirm that "ye" is a valid naming for Y but definitely not used where I live nor for the letter or a fork in the road.
Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. :)
Looking it up a poffer is a kind of hat, and a poffert is a kind of cake. "Poffert" is definitely an odd word though.
Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
#97For a while now, I've had the idea that some malicious person could have a browser extension that detects and modifies news sources to spread propaganda. We've already got joke versions of this, s/{some annoying topic}/{joke} — and for the moment, this is still in the "ha ha what a silly bug" domain.
One day, I expect it won't be silly. It'll be some more subtle transformation that rewrites one party, or one person, as having constantly sinister motives.
Will we even hear about it, if such a thing comes our way?
Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
#98Earlier 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.
I've seen something similar, briefly and ages ago now, with it doing the equivalent of* en:"I speak English" -> fr:"Je parle français".
* It might not have been French, I remember the effect not the detail
Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
#99I 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.
In Chinese Windows, Desktop has been officially translated as literal table top since at least Windows 95. I don't see the issue here XD
Re: A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
#100> 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!
The best part is YouTube has a bug that would sometimes force a dubbed language; as in, a video originally with an English audio track would get stuck between French and Italian even when you try to manually change the language back to English.