Google Translate bug mixes up Heath Ledger, Tom Cruise
UPDATE: Google representatives informed CNET News.com on Thursday that this "internal issue with Google Translate" has been fixed.
Gawker has unearthed a rather odd bug in the Google Translate software: its English-to-Spanish translator converts the name of the actor Heath Ledger, who died tragically on Tuesday, to the name of another actor--Tom Cruise. So if you enter in "I will miss Heath Ledger," Google Translate will come back with "Voy a perder Tom Cruise."This looks like a simple bug in the system, perhaps the work of a bored Googler somewhere in the world. It only affects the English-to-Spanish translation; translations from English into other languages leave "Heath Ledger" intact, and "Tom Cruise" remains "Tom Cruise" in a Spanish-to-English translation. And the bug only appears to apply to the name "Heath Ledger," as substituting a number of other actors' names (Owen Wilson, John Travolta, Russell Crowe, Jake Gyllenhaal) also fails to yield "Tom Cruise."
It'd all be pretty funny were it not for the terrible circumstances surrounding Ledger, 28, who was found dead after an apparent overdose of sleeping pills; there's nothing tasteless about it, thankfully, but cracking jokes or hinting at Scientology conspiracies just doesn't seem all that fitting. We've contacted Google for comment. But we're guessing that this won't be a very pressing issue for Mountain View.
Caroline McCarthy, a CNET News staff writer, is a downtown Manhattanite happily addicted to social-media tools and restaurant blogs. Her pre-CNET resume includes interning at an IT security firm and brewing cappuccinos. E-mail Caroline.
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supervisor's name was "ammeter" instead of "Aumeier", and that
the name of a co-worker was "cowgirl" rather than "Cowgill". I
don't remember who it thought Bill Gates or Steve Jobs were.
Michael Martin Murphey concerts
Michael Martin Murphey festivals
Google returns XXX rated spam connected with a "gold colored 'My Lexus' car" daily. When will they fix their SEO (search engine optimization) & SEM (search engine marketing) spam? This is truly FUBAR. I have to delete their spam every single day. A national celebrity/recording artist seems to be consistently connected to XXX spam and the car for the last 4 MONTHS.
No, I don't think this is a prank, either from a Google employee or from a user-suggested translations (if those are used at all, something I've never seen any indication of yet, I'm sure they're washed.) These things just happen. Glitch in the corpus.
Another example: "Jeg snakker norsk" becomes "I speak English". However, "Norsk fotball er kjedelig" still becomes "Norwegian football is boring" :-P