Thread by @3r1nG

Here's a few TBT from my #TranslationFail archives to help monoglots understand why it's so incredibly bad immigration officials are using machine translation tools to vet migrants' social media.

This headline *should* say "Police and shock groups evicted a sit-in of people opposing a highway project"

This sentence should say "They tried to hack Mansoor's iPhone using software called Pegasus, which is sold by the Israeli company NSO Group."

(Ahmed Mansoor was targeted with malware by his government. Here's info on his case if you're not familiar: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Man…)

Sometimes auto-translate deletes entire words. This translation on Facebook should say "Narcos get out of UNAM" but the word "narcos" for reasons unknown was removed.

Sometimes it deletes entire sentences. Missing text: "among them various mainstream journalists like Carmen Aristegui & Carlos Loret de Mola - who since April 2017 openly indicated having received a text message that is now known to install malware on the affected devices" 🤷🏻‍♀️

Another (super important!) word that was deleted which totally changed the story.

"murieron" --- they died.

865 children and adolescents in the child care service died. You need a human translator to fix errors like this before you publish: globalvoices.org/2017/06/20/the…

Sometimes internet slang confuses even us human translators. "KETRIZTHE" is "que triste" (how sad!) spelled phonetically in Spanish.

https://twitter.com/3r1nG/status/763115333792231425

Google translate got this one right but bing inline translator on Twitter totally fucked it up. For some reason it translated "EPN plagió tesis" (EPN plagiarized his thesis) as "EPN kidnapped thesis"

Going from plagiarism to kidnapping is a bit of an escalation.

Here's another fun Bing translation fail. This should say attorney from CDMX is responsible *for the leaks* -- not the murders. The attorney did not murder anyone.

Here's a headline fail between the original Spanish & chrome auto translate - it omits he was shot 15 times (asesinan de 15 balazos)

For some reason machine translate from Spanish to English tends to make everything male.

*una* adolescente means she's a girl.

Headline should say *conservative hackers* attack sex education manual and force to suspend of downloads.

The sex-ed manual is not conservative.

It translates correctly now so maybe the robots are learning, but this was a basic sentence structure error. eldinamo.cl/nacional/2016/…

I come across machine translation fails all the time for Spanish -> English but I usually only post the worst ones. Auto-translate for other languages like Arabic is completely indecipherable. Things can get very convoluted without a human translator.