Funny as it may sound, it’s true. If you give Google’s Translate something to translate, it translates it well on the first instance. But when you further translate a translated text into another language and then to another one and then translate it back to English, Translate fails to translate what it initially translated from. Tongue twisting, isn’t it? And confusing too!
Let’s make is simpler for you. Let’s take a simple poem and translate it from English to Chinese. Then translate from Chinese to Arabic. Then from Arabic to Taiwanese. Then from Taiwanese to French. And then back from French to English. As for common given logic, you should receive the final translation back as the same initial original text as it is from the same translation intelligence or software. For example, if we were to put ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ initially and go through all the translations and then back to English, it should come back as ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’. But it does not.
As a great example, and a hilarious one, Malinda Kathleen Reese, a 20 year-old performer, did a similar test with Google Translate. She fed the translator with lyrics from the famous song (OST) ‘Let It Go’ from Frozen. She translated the lyrics from English to various other languages and back to English and it returned junk. She finally sang the same song with the new lyrics and here is how it goes.
For those who haven’t heard the original sound track, check out the video below.
Malinda runs a YouTube channel, which features all the various blunders of Google Translate. Here is another one where Christmas carols was translated by Google Translated.
Here’s ‘A whole new world’ the famous OST from Aladdin.
So what are you gonna try with Google Translate? Think again.
