Google Translation

The limitations of automatic translation are illustrated in an interesting recent Language Log posting (here). It appears that a protester in New York wanted to show the message

No more corruption

in Chinese, and so he typed it into the Google Translate facility and got this:

没有更多的腐败

(You can try it yourself to confirm it.)

The problem here is that the Chinese actually says: "There is no more corruption", which is almost certainly the opposite of the message the person was hoping to put on his banner.

In fact, you get just as bad a result if you use Google Translate to translate 'No more corruption' into Malay:

tiada rasuah lebih

We really must be careful how much we depend on automatic translation software at present.