{"id":822,"date":"2012-12-13T10:11:00","date_gmt":"2012-12-13T10:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/xislblogs.xtreamlab.net\/slwoods\/?p=822"},"modified":"2012-12-14T17:36:07","modified_gmt":"2012-12-14T17:36:07","slug":"the-dangers-of-google-translate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/?p=822","title":{"rendered":"The dangers of Google Translate"},"content":{"rendered":"

Amongst professional linguists, Google Translate is a constant source of amusement, frustration and other emotions in between due to its lack of reliability.<\/p>\n

However, the rest of the world doesn’t necessarily recognise the limitations of machine translation tools and this can have devastating effects in some instances.<\/p>\n

This is amply illustrated today as UPI reports<\/a> that Danish police made a mistake when they used Mountain View’s language mangler on a text message while questioning a man suspected of financing terrorism.<\/p>\n

The suspect’s attorney says the result was a mistranslation that caused his client to suffer a breakdown following his interrogation. The man in question, an ethnic Kurd, was suspected of donating money to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) through ROJ-TV, a Kurdish language station based in Copenhagen.<\/p>\n

The European Union classes the PKK as a terrorist organisation.<\/p>\n

According to the Copenhagen Post<\/a>, Thorkild H\u00f8yer, the suspect’s lawyer, said the mistranslation violates a Danish law barring police from giving misleading information during questioning and also called the use of Google Translate unacceptable in legal proceedings.<\/p>\n

Inspector Svend Foldager of the Copenhagen Police said the incident was the only one he knows of where police have used Google Translate. <\/p>\n

The Google Translate version of the message in Turkish read: “I call for a meeting.” However, according to H\u00f8yer, the message was a mass invitation and part of a text-message chain without a personal sender.<\/p>\n

The mistranslation of the text message was subsequently discovered by an interpreter.<\/p>\n

ROJ-TV itself has been found guilty by a Danish court of supporting the Kurdish separatist organisation PKK and has been fined Kr. 5.2 mn. in a controversial case that took 6 years to reach a verdict. However, the station is appealing the fine and has not had its broadcasting licence revoked.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Amongst professional linguists, Google Translate is a constant source of amusement, frustration and other emotions in between due to its lack of reliability. However, the rest of the world doesn’t necessarily recognise the limitations of machine translation tools and this can have devastating effects in some instances. This is amply illustrated today as UPI reports […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,9],"tags":[10,22,23],"class_list":["post-822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-translation-and-language-related-matters","category-tech","tag-facepalm","tag-language","tag-tech-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=822"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":837,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822\/revisions\/837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}