Immigration Officials Use Google Translate to Vet Refugees
propublica.org
propublica.org
For example, if you try to translate "condescending" to Spanish it will give you "condescendiente", but that means "to tend to adapt to the likes and wishes of others", which is completely different from the English definition of "to display a patronizing, superior attitude".
Translate "fallacy" and it will give you "falacia", which is kind of similar, but different. In English it means "incorrectness of reasoning", but in Spanish it means "false argument to trick or cause error", meaning that the Spanish word implies malicious intent.
Translate "patronize" and it will give you "patrocinar", which means "to sponsor". "patrocinar" can't be used in the sense of "to treat in a condescending manner".
It's pretty hard to catch these kinds of things until you're really experienced with both languages.
One of the big ones was that Outlook would often get translated into something equivalent to "worldview." When something like a quarter to one third of all requests are to reset an Outlook password, this makes the translation look really bad.
Another common mistranslation was "remote desktop" or "Can I remote into your machine?" The most common translations usually came out to the effect of "Can I use your TV remote?
It's certainly possible to train custom models on a corpus, and use them instead, but that requires quite a lot of effort and people that know the languages in question to verify.
That translation is pretty accurate for at least one of the senses of patronise, though. Word-sense disambiguation is what’s failing Google Translate in that case.
"Don't patronise me.” -> "No me patrocines.”
“Don’t patronize me.” -> "No me patrocines.”
"Don't patronise me!” -> "¡No me patrocines!”
“Don’t patronize me!” -> "¡No me patrocines!”
"Do not patronise me.” -> "No me patrocines.”
"Do not patronize me.” -> "No seas condescendiente conmigo.”
“Do not patronise me!” -> "¡No me patrocines!”
"Do not patronize me!” -> "No seas condescendiente conmigo.”
Word-sense disambiguation seems to work if you write “do not” instead of “don’t” and use ‘-ize' spelling, it fails otherwise.
I’m aware that “condescendiente” doesn’t mean “condescending”, but I’m taking it as evidence that Google Translate interpreted “patronize” with the “to condescend” sense rather than the “to sponsor or support” sense, meaning that word-sense disambiguation works better in those instances.
Though, talking about what it interprets or understands of the words is also wrong. At the end of it all (including neural nets), its logic is probably still based on matching words and phrases between languages without really understanding their meaning like you or I do.
Google Translate offers the option for people to correct it, but many people are probably misled by the false friends. Even I don't know of a proper Spanish translation for the concept of being "patronizing" or "condescending". I can't think of a good word or phrase, and I've never heard a Spanish speaker use anything of the sort. It's something I'd have to explain.
Every online translator I check gives me "condescendiente", but if I check Spanish dictionaries, including the most authoritative one at https://rae.es/, they give no such definition. The closest words are the equivalent of "arrogant" and "to spoil" which aren't really the same.
It may be that a proper translation simply does not exist. That also happens. For example, as far as I know, there's no English equivalent of "estrenar" in Spanish, which means "to use for the first time".
For example, "excited" in English and "excitado" in Spanish both have the same definitions of 1) being enthusiastic and 2) being sexually aroused. However, which is the primarily understood definition is different. When you say "I'm excited to go with you" in English, nobody is going to understand you're sexually aroused. In Spanish, they can/will.
At least for being enthusiastic, the proper translation of "excited" is "emocionado" which Google Translate does do correctly, at least.
Well duh. The whole point of studying a language is to.. be able to know it?