dear systran: you suck

[rone]

Go to Google Translate and translate "For your information" into any language other than Japanese or Chinese.  You'll see the same results on Babelfish.  I find this a rather baffling error.

Comments

[jwgh]

"Le For Your Information, le bureau sera clôturé demain." For Your Information is masculine!

[schwa242.livejournal.com]

And yet "Your Information" translates just fine. Perhaps because those three words together a figure of speech used in the English langrage, and is hitting some wall in their database o' languages.

[schwa242.livejournal.com]

Those three words together a figure of speech used in the English langrage

I don't know why I bother pretending that I can type coherently.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Oh, you were pretending?

[schwa242.livejournal.com]

Well, pretending to myself.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I noticed that, too. What's perplexing is that All The Words Are Capitalized (except the Korean, where the spaces are replaced by dots [?]), which might work with the 'figure of speech' theory.

[urbeatle.livejournal.com]

and yet, "pour votre information" translates from French to English.

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

I'm too lazy to check this, but it might be because it's a common abbreviation. So in order not to make explanations of the acronym non-sensical, they don't translate it.

It probably makes more sense for other abbreviations, if my guess is right.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Stop being so lazy and test your hypothesis with other common abbreviations, damn your eyes. This is not a journal of rickety, faux science!

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

Can't, I'm already asleep,

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

Results so far:

Can't find any other acronyms that don't translate. However, translating stupid overused acronyms into French makes me giggle.

New theory: They have a big table of common acronyms and how they should be translated, and they forgot to put in an actual translation for FYI.

[mskala.livejournal.com]

It's not a complete sentence, and I wouldn't be surprised if the parser is somewhat limited on the non-sentence constructions it can accept. That could well have bizarre effects like being able to translate "your information" but not "for your information" - because "your information" is a noun phrase and "for your information" is, I'm not even sure what it's called, some kind of fragment that has to attach to something else to make sense.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Fine, try "I shall tell you this for your information."

As urbeatle pointed out, translating the French version into English works, and i just tried the Spanish as well.

[mezdeathhead.livejournal.com]

Well, I tried a sentance including "for your information."

"I eat cake, for your information" translates to "Mangio il For Your Information della torta" in Italian.

[pvaneynd]

Well. I once worked for a competitor of systran and they have a pretty dim view of their technology. What they told me is that it is pretty much a pattern patcher written in 390 assembler at a time. If the pattern isn't known you get no translation.

Knowing that my former company had a parser that would analyze the sentence, generate a tree-representation of the structure of the sentence, and then translate the tree into the other language, taking into account the properties of the other language you can understand their amusement at problems like this. Their parse could even propagate sex information between different parts of the sentence (the subject is female, so we have to translate this word to that or the 'vous' isn't plural, but the polite form, so use 'U' as a translation instead of 'zij'). The problem of course is that if your original sentence was junk you would get no translation at all.

As far as I know the system was used in the past to translate a big spanish newspapers from one form of spanish into the other with only light manual editing at the other end.