Machine translation goofs and cock-ups

General Discussion
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In another thread David (@Aquitaine) mentioned the iPad translation app which takes a photo, runs optical character recognition on it and pushes the result through an on-line translator. Android has something similar.

But, useful as these apps are (and they are really useful) they do go off piste occasionally - as do the online translators such as Google translate and Deepl.

So, does anyone have any favourite goofs - keep them reasonably recent because the modern translators have a big AI component so are much more reliable than they were a few years ago.

For instance Google still renders “pñte à l’ancienne” as “old fashioned dough” (as does Deepl) which does not sound terribly appetising!

It also seems that it translated the English phrase “I am a flat earther” to “Je suis un fou” (but seems to have stopped doing that).

Does anyone have any other amusing machine translations that they have come across?

And, of course, this is the perfect time to link to this Monty Python sketch :slight_smile:

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Bonne fĂȘte Ă  tous les grands-pĂšres was translated by Facebook today as Happy Birthday to all Grandfathers.

Um
 so near and yet so far :grin:

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It’s not from an electronic App but from a book about French verbs. Towards the back there are some useful phrases including this one;

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I’ve always wondered who you are going to say, ‘I love you’, to unless you would normally address them as tu.

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You can say “Je vous aime bien” though can’t you? (I agree the example above looks a little confused)

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Some years ago when learning French at night school in the UK-I had a tutor who had one English parent and one French. While discussing the use of ’ tu ’ and ’ vous ’ he said- "Of course there are exceptions. My French grandparents were married for 50 years and always addressed each other as ’ vous ’ ".

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