Google has helpfully (mis)-translated my profile Thread poster: Jessica Noyes
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Jessica Noyes 
United States
Local time: 18:13
Member
Spanish to English
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Today when I checked the visitors to my profile, I saw that five visits had been made from "original IP address" of Mountain View, California, and "came from" translate.google.com.ar. When I clicked on the link, I found something that looked just like my profile, but in Spanish. Google had "helpfully" translated my profile, making, of course, numerous mistakes, but the translation looked just like my profile including the scrolling text I added recently. However, I already have posted a (sli... See more Today when I checked the visitors to my profile, I saw that five visits had been made from "original IP address" of Mountain View, California, and "came from" translate.google.com.ar. When I clicked on the link, I found something that looked just like my profile, but in Spanish. Google had "helpfully" translated my profile, making, of course, numerous mistakes, but the translation looked just like my profile including the scrolling text I added recently. However, I already have posted a (slightly outdated now) Spanish version of my profile on Proz, but this one was quite different. I am wondering if Spanish speakers seeking a Spanish to English translator will find my version, or the Google Translate version. How ironic that my translation services are being publicized by a poor translation -- one I had no hand in requesting, supplying, or creating. Thoughts??? ▲ Collapse
| | | | David Wright
Austria
Local time: 00:13
German to English
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| I would be worried | Oct 12, 2010 |
After all, a poor translation into spanish is not going to convinve potential clients is it. I doubt whether Google is legally entitled to do this, since you own the copyright in your material and that includes the right to translate it. I would contact them and ask them to remove the translation asap.
| | | | Simone Linke
Germany
Local time: 00:13
Member (2009)
English to German
+ ...
| That's how Google works | Oct 12, 2010 |
There is not much you can do here unless you want to sue and take down Google.
The low-quality translation that you have seen is the result of someone browsing your profile and clicking "Yes" when asked by Google "Do you want to translate this page?".
If you use Chrome as your browser, it will normally ask you whenever you encounter a webpage in a foreign language if you want to have this page translated. If you click yes, Google will display the very same page but replace the... See more There is not much you can do here unless you want to sue and take down Google.
The low-quality translation that you have seen is the result of someone browsing your profile and clicking "Yes" when asked by Google "Do you want to translate this page?".
If you use Chrome as your browser, it will normally ask you whenever you encounter a webpage in a foreign language if you want to have this page translated. If you click yes, Google will display the very same page but replace the source language with your target language. It will NOT change anything in the webpage per se - it simply shows you how the page would look in another language. And the translation is based on Google's MT engine.
Alternatively, you can go to Google Translate and enter the link of any URL you want and see a translated version. Same principle here.
Google does not claim to have any rights to the original material that the user wants translated. Nor does Google list the incorrect Spanish version in the search engine.
The search engine lists your regular profile, with your regular Spanish version. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Lingua 5B
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Local time: 00:13
Member (2009)
English to Croatian
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| Nearly impossible to do | Oct 12, 2010 |
David Wright wrote:
I would contact them and ask them to remove the translation asap.
It's nearly impossible to "contact" Google, for such matters at least.
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Perhaps Google could be pressured to provide a disclaimer with its "translations"--something to the effect of: The translation you are about to view is machine generated and likely to contain numerous serious inaccuracies due to the limitations of this technology. Only a human translator can provide an error-free translation that is faithful to the source text.
| | | | OG Pete
United States
Russian to English
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| Samuel Murray
Netherlands
Local time: 00:13
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
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| Could also be automatic | Oct 12, 2010 |
Simone Linke wrote:
The low-quality translation that you have seen is the result of someone browsing your profile and clicking "Yes" when asked by Google "Do you want to translate this page?".
I have seen search results of pages that have been pre-translated by Google already (although I'm not sure how prevalent this behaviour is). It happens particularly when I search for something in Afrikaans and very few actual Afrikaans pages have that content, then Google takes English pages that conform to that search query, and presents them as "Afrikaans" results in the search results (translated and all).
| | | | | Google has helpfully (mis)-translated my profile | Oct 12, 2010 |
Agree. I guess this is the way to follow to avoid such kind of things.
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Simone Linke
Germany
Local time: 00:13
Member (2009)
English to German
+ ...
Samuel Murray wrote:
I have seen search results of pages that have been pre-translated by Google already (although I'm not sure how prevalent this behaviour is). It happens particularly when I search for something in Afrikaans and very few actual Afrikaans pages have that content, then Google takes English pages that conform to that search query, and presents them as "Afrikaans" results in the search results (translated and all).
I wouldn't like that... but whenever I see automatically translated Websites (usually via Google), there's always a hint somewhere that this page has been translated by Google, not by the site owners. Without such a hint, this would of course be misleading and I'd fully agree that this was unacceptable.
| | | | OG Pete
United States
Russian to English
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| It works: google translate stopped on my profile through span tags | Oct 12, 2010 |
Hi guys,
I wrapped the first paragraph of the "about me" section in my profile in span tags, it blocked English>Russian google translate.
< s*pan class="notranslate"*>(your text here> < */span> (remove the asterisks (*)), we aren't allowed to post html tags in forum posts. I'd be happy to help anyone with this.
Good luck!
Peter
[Edited at 2010-10-12 11:25 GMT]
| | | | Jessica Noyes
United States
Local time: 18:13
Member
Spanish to English
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
A quick thank you to all for support and good advice. I am headed away for the day, and will try out these helpful suggestions, and check out Sam's follow-up as soon as I am back at my desk.
| | | | Stefano Papaleo
Italy
Local time: 00:13
Member (2005)
English to Italian
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| It should be default... | Nov 14, 2010 |
I think that, given what ProZ is and claims to be, in order to protect themselves and us from undesired MT of our profile and site content, they should include by default the 'notranslate' tag in all pages. After all, we can only edit a few parts of our profile page but have no access to the head section etc., so using span or no translate classes for other tags and so on is only a partial workaround and would make us all look bad and mislead the visitors.
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| I'm submitting a support request to ask staff to comment | Nov 14, 2010 |
Dear staff
I agree with Stefano´s suggestion, and all the comments above.
Could this be done please?
Or have the technical staff any other comments and suggestions?
Looking forward to seeing what you think!
(Support ticket submitted immediately after posting this.)
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| | | | Suzan Hamer
Netherlands
Local time: 00:13
English
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| I hope staff agrees, Christine. | Nov 14, 2010 |
Stefano Papaleo wrote:
I think that, given what ProZ is and claims to be, in order to protect themselves and us from undesired MT of our profile and site content, they should include by default the 'notranslate' tag in all pages. After all, we can only edit a few parts of our profile page but have no access to the head section etc., so using span or no translate classes for other tags and so on is only a partial workaround and would make us all look bad and mislead the visitors.
In another thread on the same subject, I noted also that while I could use the code given to protect some text on my ProZ profile pages, there was no room to insert it in my tagline, for example, and anyone reading my user message or tagline MT'd into Dutch would think I was an idiot.
http://www.proz.com/forum/prozcom_suggestions/182735-disallow_google_from_translating_profile_pages.html#1602587
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