How do you say Vimeo in French? Google Translate thinks it is pronounced “YouTube.” It is translating the English sentence “videos on Vimeo” into “des videos sur YouTube” when prompted to translate from English to French. When you try to translate Vimeo alone (not in a sentence), the French translation results in “Vimeo.” But in a sentence, Google translates Vimeo into “YouTube.”
Is this a glitch or some Easter egg hidden by a French Google engineer as an inside joke? The glitch only appears when translating from English to French. It translates fine to other languages.
Man you seriously need to go on a date or something because this story is reaching.
lmao!
Bad point for Google !
This is just a result of Google’s translation strategy which is a big ol’ bayesian learning algorithm based on a large number of sample texts. This side-effect pops up with things that have a correlation to a countries language, even if they aren’t actually the same word in the other language. Like translating “America” in an English sentence to “Italy”. My guess is that Youtube is more popular to the French than Vimeo.
Hey Josh, I read what you wrote and have used my own learning algorithms to translate it: “This is the result of Google’s strategy to make sure that Google-related sites and services are always preferred. Everything that has a correlation to Google is obviously better than anything that doesn’t. Like translating “Best search engine” in English to “Google” in Web-ish.”
No offense intended :p
Haha, that’s funny.
The same problem with Italian and Turkish.
For the past year, Google has translated the word “English” to “français” and “French” to “anglais”. It also converted the word “euro” to “dollar” and vice-versa. It was infuriatingly stupid, and they only fixed it recently.
they also translated Wii to Playstation in spanish, now it’s fixed
competition killer — google is on some bull shhhh…
ANTI-TRUST!
ANTI-TRUST!
ANTI-TRUST!
ANTI-TRUST!
Anti-trust??? naaah….
See my post: http://blog.col...th-adsense.html
HAHAHHAHHA
http://tr.im/gk8j
Who cares? It’s just French?
They translate everything else inaccurately, why not this?
They have better featured videos on Vimeo than on YouTube.
Google’s machine dependence at its best.
@Josh —
Google is using Statistical Machine Translation.. it is a little more complicated than just casting it off of Bayesian.
The idea behind SMT is that Google looks to see if words can be replaced with each other. In the most basic terms, it notices that many times when someone writes a sentence about YouTube, the same type of words/phrases around it are also common for Vimeo. It is a very cleaver method of using user generated content to come up with translation of texts that normally dictionaries would not be able to provide.
It’s a damn ester egg!
It is definitely a glitch they translated Vimeo to Youtube ,hope Google will correct it soon.
Very funny
I guess it has something to do with their “Suggest a better translation”. I can imagine that this one runs automatically. Means: Enough people suggest a better translation and google check their translations and replace the old one.
hahahaha like others I want to know how you came across such an issue?
pretty soon they’ll translate “how to fight the DMCA” into “nonsense”
I remember a similar easter-egg was in Adobe PageMill. The spell checker would flag “FrontPage” as a spelling error and offer “PageMill” as a correction.
[For those who tuned in late: FrontPage was Microsoft's competing web page editor]
@Leena – the translations are not done by humans but by machines with their algorithmic brains. So, I think your question (i.e. “Is this a glitch or some Easter egg hidden by a French Google engineer as an inside joke?”) might very well have nothing to do with it.
http://www.goog...ranslation.html
Same problem in Vietnamese.
From VNese: Chia sẻ video clip.vn
(Clip.vn is the popular video sharing site in Vietnam)
To: YouTube video sharing
>> I think Google picks some well-known video sharing websites in some languages (some countries) and “translate” to Youtube.
(An advice from Google)
This happened a year or so ago
google translate thought “Nintendo Wii” was “Playstation”
http://www.yout...re=channel_page
http://twitter.com/zafarali
Google it’s not perfect
this is only indicative of how google drives traffic to youtube. most searches will find a video on youtube that makes passing mention before you find the most relevant link on the topic. google used to show the youtube links up top, now they show them just above the fold after the anti-trust scrutiny of the yahoo deal.
Wow this is SO important, thank for reporting!
This story remember me Google maps some years ago: If you asked directions from New York to Paris, one indication said: “Swim 3826 km to Paris…”