Google Translates Ivan the Terrible as “Abraham Lincoln”
A Digger discovered this oddity in Google’s translator, a biography of Russian tsar Ivan The Terrible (or Ivan IV) in which the title character’s name is translated into “Abraham Lincoln”. Weird.
Google translates Иван Грозный - Россия as “Abraham Lincoln - Russia”. Wikipedia’s article on ol’ Ivan spells Ivan Grozny (the term translated normally as Ivan The Terrible) as Ива́н Гро́зный. They are roughly identical, but Google may be getting tripped up on the lack of accent marks.
Microsoft’s new Windows Live Translator, which uses an updated version of the same Systran translation software, translates the same title almost right as “Ivan Groznyy”. Perhaps Google needs to install the latest version.
One good thing: You’ll notice Google Tranlate’s new overlay feature (new to me, at least), which shows the original text if you overlay the translation. Very useful.
Google doesn’t use Systran for Russian. It uses a statistical machine translation system developed in-house.
Comment by Ionut | September 10, 2007
People can submitted improved (or alternate) translation to Google’s translation service, so this is likely a practical joke.
Comment by W. Shedd | September 10, 2007
[…] Via Inside Google […]
Pingback by Google Tranduce Ivan el Terrible como “Abraham Lincoln”. | Krakatoa 2.0 | September 10, 2007
Ionut: That actually makes this look worse. Eek.
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | September 10, 2007