Chinese Google Translate Sabotage | Hacker News Reader

Chinese Google Translate Sabotage

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu

14 pointsmcenedella7 comments

I'm glad the realities of the oppressive Chinese government are finally coming to light. 10 years ago, I remember having discussions with a friend about China (an American) and he was convinced that the oppression just wasn't happening and all a crackpot conspiracy theory.

Are you sure it's the government, not some random Chinese though? I've know enough patriotic mainlanders who would do this. Brainwashed you may say, but still they would act like that genuinely.

This was an American and not ethnically Chinese.

I have also met a few extremely left-leaning/socialist Americans that were part of my meetup group a few years back that loved China's system and praised it as better than the US in every way. All concerns about brutality, taking away rights, and an authoritarian regime were waved off as something beneficial and required to maintain a good society.

About 20 years ago, I worked for a computer store that regularly hired Chinese immigrants, because the owner was himself Chinese. One woman would not even allow me to mention the Chinese government in front of her. She was afraid that they were somehow listening to her and that her family back home would be punished. She had been in the US for at least 8 or 9 years at this point.

Sure. Those Chinese exists, but ones from the other end too, living in north america no less.

Calling this sabotage is jumping to conclusions really quickly. Google translate has many issues and can mess up lots of sentences. Sometimes completely inverting the meaning or returning wrong results because of the models it was trained on. It's not a word-for-word translation.

Also you can provide your own corrections for the translated sentences, so if you see something obviously wrong, you can try that. (maybe someone did it to this sentence on purpose as well)

I don't think a conspiracy theory is needed for this case. It's just an unfortunate glitch of the machine learning. On the other hand, I acknowledge problems like these have serious consequences.

After Google Translate's 2016 algorithm update (https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/software/googl...), anecdotally, many people started seeing it having problems on distinguish between a positive sentence and a negative sentence (e.g. has/has not, with/without), even simple ones.

Also, when Google cannot "understand" a sentence, it simply gives an output that happens to have the best match of its training patterns, often the opposite meaning. For short sentences without context, it's especially problematic.

In 2018, Google Translate briefly became a Twitter meme when it made the following translation. I cannot find the original thread, but I quickly Googled some keywords and found related tweets.

* 谷歌手机很卡顿 (Google's mobile phone is very laggish) => Google mobile phone is very fast https://twitter.com/abcdsxg/status/980985925894197248

I tried to find a random Wikipedia article, and I was still able to reproduce a similar problem today.

* 考虑到庭审涉及信息的敏感性，法庭分别进行了两次独立的听证会，一次公开进行，另一次不公开 (Because of the sensitive nature of information at stake in the trial, two separate hearings were conducted, one in public, and the other in private) => Taking into account the sensitivity of the information involved in the trial, the court conducted two separate hearings, one in public and one in the open.

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