Google Translator: Russia and Mordor

Good morning!

Yesterday I read an article about a “fantastic” mistake of Google Translator. Apparently in the translation from Ukranian into Russian, the sentence “Russian Federation” was translated like “Mordor”, the fictitious land of The Lord of The Rings ruled by the evil Sauron.

Logically, Russia doesn't mean Mordor, but it was a translation mistake, because Google Translator works with statistics and it chose wrong with the analysis of all documents that it uses. Google Translator doesn't apply gramatical rules and that's why it makes this kind of mistakes.

The reflection about this topic is not to use directly a translation from an automatic traslator. You have to check it always or, if the text has a languages that you don't control, ask for help. A translator or proofreader will help you. This mistake about Mordor is very showy, but it is possible that the translator will make some unnoticed mistakes and your text won't have the quality that it requires.

Here you have the article in Spanish. 

Translation mistakes (III): how to change the cartridges in the printer

Good morning. Today I'm going to show you a fragment of a flyer that explains how to change the cartridges in the printer. Because of the information that I deduce of the complete text, I think that it is a translation from French. French is the first language, in which everything is explained and, in case of doubts, it refers to a website with domain .fr.

Here I show the text:

As you can see, there are punctuation mistakes: (*Felicidades! because in Spanish we use both exclamation points, blank space between colon and the rest of the text, capital letter after a comma), grammatical errors (*es remanufacturado) where it would be better the passive voice, accentuation (*vació when the correct word here is vacío, *pagina, *esta) and bad expression in general.

Now, If you want to see my proposed correction into Spanish, click here.

Translation mistakes (II): Steppenwolf

One of the things in which probably agree all translators, is that since you become a translator, in reading is added a critical touch (consciously or unconsciously). I'm currently reading the book Steppenwolf of Hermann Hesse, and I couldn't avoid detecting a mistake in the translation into Spanish.

The original language of the book is German, so the mistake appears in the word "Gimnasio". The German word is Gymnasium and in the German education system it refers to the high school system. In Spanish, it makes no sense the translation as "gimnasio" (gym), because there is no level in our educational system with that name, and what really refers is the ESO (Obligatory Secondary Education) or the Bachiller (High school) (no equivalent 100%).

As you can see, in translation you have to take into account the cultural implication of some words. Maybe in this case, a novel, the mistake goes unnoticed, because it is simply a comment of one of the characters and it doesn't have relevance for the story. However, if this mistake appears in an academic record or in a CV, it will have more importance and other consequences.

Here you have more information if you are interested in knowing a little more of the German education system.