Google Translate Mystery
Besides that the very algorithm of the google translate is a mystery itself, I would very much like to know how stuff like this happens:
One the left you got Balkan folk and pop singers’ names, on the left you got obviously wrong translations to English. Now what I don’t understand is how some singers names are translated OK, while these pictured ones are completely wrong.
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I’m Serbian and I got the paper to prove it
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Isn’t it because one can improve the google translation by suggestion some personnalized translations? So some of those might have been translated well by some users, and some are just the result of the (obviously bad) Google algorithm?
What do you guys think?
Who suggested that “Jelena Karleusa” is the Serbian word for “Eric Clapton”?
No, it’s because statistical machine translation works by finding words in similar contexts.
Although I’d like to see Jelena Karleusa and Eric Clapton on tour together.
Is it possible that this is another example of “Google bombing”, ie a prank by a group of people who all contributed with the same translation for certain term?
Considering that the name baja mali knindza translated to Sami Yusef, I’m assuming that this translation is a result of some sort of “google bombing” or something similar. Either that or Google Translator has pretty impressive sense of irony and snark.
I tried putting in the first five names, but this time translating from Croatian to English-I got nothing.
I tried putting some random names of Croatian pop/rock stars into the translator: Severina, Marko Perkovic-Thompson, Danijela Martinovic and Alka Vuica.
The only name that actually ‘translated’ was Severina. Her name translates to avenged sevenfold
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avenged_Sevenfold