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Lorem Ipsum translated by Google

translate.google.ca

361 points by lemieux 13 years ago · 76 comments

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agnokapathetic 13 years ago

Google Translate uses statistical machine translation [1] seeded from a gigantic automatically curated parallel corpus of similar documents.

As"lorem ipsum" is a typographic placeholder, the filled in version appears appears to have the same document structure (HTML) and would therefore be statistically likely candidates as translatable pairs.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_PzPDRPwlA

JonnieCache 13 years ago

It's obviously been crawling support tickets/emails with people complaining about non-forthcoming copy:

    How long before any meaningful development.
    Until mandatory functional requirements to developers.
We've all been there in one form or another. Those of us that do client work anyway.
  • m0nty 13 years ago

    It's free verse, from the living, beating heart of the Internet. All those support tickets have developed a special kind of pathos:

        How long before any meaningful development.
        Until mandatory functional requirements to developers.
        But across the country in the spotlight in the notebook.
        The show was shot.
jvdh 13 years ago

This is not the traditional text of Lorem Ipsum, save for the first sentence. The actual translation is far less exciting. The only thing I noticed it that it translates something with "train" while I don't think a word for that exists in Latin.

Actual Lorem Ipsum [0]:

  Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
Actual translation in Google Translate: http://bit.ly/127UkCu

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum

  • tricolon 13 years ago

    For some reason, "aute irure" is translated as "bullet train"; however, neither of them are Latin words.

    • laumars 13 years ago

      IIRC Google Translate doesn't work as a straight "word swap" like other tarnslation tools perhaps do. Google Translate works in a similar way to their search engine in that common phrases and works on popular sites are compared and probable meaning are. This is why names celebrities sometimes get translated by the names of their peers[1] and why the pseudo-Latin in Lorem Ipsum translates.

      [1] http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100905144430AA... (I know it's a terrible source, but it's the only link I could find)

    • gren 13 years ago

      And "cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur." is "that produces no resultant online applications."

      WTF!

hawkharris 13 years ago

I never knew Google had a "Translate to Allen Ginsberg" option.

makmanalp 13 years ago

I was going to jump in and suggest that google's statistical translation methods were being thrown off by lipsum being used in so many strange contexts, but it turns out "Lorem Ipsum" is a mangled nonsensical version of the original text:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum#History_and_discove...

  • cpaone 13 years ago

    Thank you. 'Lorem Ipsum' isn't Latin. Translation tools, dictionaries, or your old high school text books are not going to help you 'get it right.'

    This is probably an Easter Egg.

  • pepijndevos 13 years ago

    The original is translated much better.

bbx 13 years ago

Oddly, "Vestibulum ante ipsum primis" translates to "Cisco Security", although taking each word separately translates to "Manufacturing before football first". I don't remember much about my Latin year but if each word has a different meaning depending upon what other word it's combined to, the possibilities are endless.

  • mjn 13 years ago

    Because of Google's approach based strictly on statistical regularities, words can completely change translations based on context even in languages where that wouldn't normally happen, because the contexts can swing the estimates.

    One funny one comes with city names, where Google sometimes mistakenly "translates" a city to a different city that happens to have frequent usage in the target language, in contexts that it must find analogous.

    For example, here are some translations involving the Danish city Billund (location of Lego), which change even based on punctuation:

       Billund -> Billund
       Jeg er i Billund -> I am in Billund
       Jeg er i Billund. -> I'm in London.
    
    For whatever reason, intriguing place-name translations are particularly common in the Danish->English case. Brøndby is often Red Sox, Odense is Kentucky, and Hillerød is sometimes Whatfield.
    • mikeash 13 years ago

      My favorite one was the word "Amistad!" translated Spanish->English:

          Amistad! -> Friendship!
      
      You could add more exclamation points, and they'd show up on the other side:

          Amistad!!! -> Friendship!!!
      
      But when you reached five, you apparently hit some sort of context changeover, because:

          Amistad!!!!! -> Murder!
      
      Sadly, it has since been fixed.
      • dlhavema 13 years ago

        if someone kept on yelling "Friendship!" louder and louder, it might lead to murder...

    • nknighthb 13 years ago

      Now I'm imagining an automated translation of a story from, say, the Star Trek universe to the Star Wars universe, substituting place and character names based on frequency of use in each universe.

    • justincormack 13 years ago

      No doubt would be confused by "peru is the Spanish for turkey" as well...

  • Someone 13 years ago

    St. Martin St. Dr. Martin Luther King Dr. Red & black; Black & Decker. Blue moon, blue Nile, blue sky?

andrewflnr 13 years ago

It's not an easter egg, at least not in the sense that it's special-cased to that one chunk of text. It worked with some arbitrary lorem ipsum I generated from lipsum.com . I think this one might actually be funnier: http://translate.google.com/#auto/en/Aliquam%20viverra%20mat....

TurplePurtle 13 years ago

    Funny lion always feasible, innovative policies hatred assured.
Seems like commentary on the fall of ancient reddit.
chrisbuc 13 years ago

The "Alpha" mouseover notes of the Latin translator

   "This language is still in early stages of development..."  
Really? I thought it had been around for a while... :)
ruswick 13 years ago

This sort of incoherence really isn't unexpected, considering that Lorem Ipsum is not a piece of coherent text, but rather a series of sentence fragments and even fragments of words.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum

kps 13 years ago

I commented [1] in a previous version of this [2] that you get amusing character-by-character changes typing into the text box by hand. The results are slightly different today.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5201472

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5200728

delinka 13 years ago

I can't decide if this is a result of Google's use of statistical machine translation, or an Easter Egg.

  • bdcravens 13 years ago

    Probably an Easter Egg, given that it's been in use since a time prior to common use of "online"

    • delinka 13 years ago

      If Google takes its statistical corpus from online, then I think the SMT still makes sense.

josscrowcroft 13 years ago

Oh God I really hope people start using this in place of Lorem Ipsum.

diiq 13 years ago

I think the corpus of latin/english translations is not large enough, because the translation of even the basest schoolboy latin seems mangled; different declensions of the same word get different translations. 'Ancilla' [female slave, I was taught] is translated: maid, handmaiden, women, and ancillary, depending on declension?

  • haberman 13 years ago

    Oh, I think I can shed some light on this! Never studied Latin but I sing a lot of church music. The very popular "Magnificat" text in Latin in includes the line:

      quia respexit humilitatem ancillae suae.
    
    This is traditionally translated as:

      Because he hath regarded the humility of his handmaid;
    
    Or:

      For he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden.
    
    See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnificat . In context, Mary is definitely not talking about being a slave, but a willing servant.
Simple1234 13 years ago

Innovative policies, hatred assured.

jdmitch 13 years ago

Surely there has been some manipulating of the search results (this non-standard version of) Lorem Ipsum to get those results form google translate. A more standard Lorem Ipsum text comes up with a pretty standard translation (it actually seems to revert to the original Ciceronian text which it is based on).

jwarren 13 years ago

Lorem ipsum is frequently misrepresented as nonsense text. It's not actually the case: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2290/what-does-the-...

  • dimitar 13 years ago

    It is nonsense - the text was altered - with modified, added and removed words, that make it nonsense. This is why the latin translator doesn't translate it. It is based though on a Cicero text.

  • TheCoelacanth 13 years ago

    It's not completely nonsense, but it definitely doesn't have any coherent meaning. It started as an excerpt from Cicero but it was mangled by removing words and letters without regard for sentence structure or even for preserving words. Some of the words aren't even real Latin words.

stackcollision 13 years ago

I wonder if this is how they came up with the dialog for the Hybrids in Battlestar Galactica.

Apocryphon 13 years ago

"We will be sure to post a comment." I thought that was a sign that this was an intentionally unserious translation that an engineer snuck in as an Easter Egg. Though it's a bit more absurdist than Google's usual brand of humor.

b0rsuk 13 years ago

This is a wonderful "correct horse battery staple" password generator !!

aasarava 13 years ago

In case you're interested in learning more, or just having a quick lorem ipsum generator: http://lipsum.com

paxtonab 13 years ago

This almost sent me furiously scrambling for my high school Latin text book. Almost...

tenpoundhammer 13 years ago

The best part, "Information that is no corporate Japan."

  • josteink 13 years ago

    I was about to post that exact same thing. "Information that is no corporate Japan". You can definitely say that again.

willurd 13 years ago

I read this like spoken word poetry. It was quite amusing.

tomp 13 years ago

Also, please note that "lorem" is translated as "China", and "ipsum" is translated as "footbal". At least for me.

tomphoolery 13 years ago

The English translation is way better. :P

kamakazizuru 13 years ago

I wonder why Cisco Security is in there?

  • dllthomas 13 years ago

    Cisco Security has been vital since ancient times, obviously there would be Latin for it.

    • fennecfoxen 13 years ago

      Indeed! Cisco Security saved the ancient Republic from the Cataline rebellion, delivering famous orations. "Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? Quam diu etiam furor iste tuus nos eludet? Quem ad finem sese effrenata iactabit audacia?"

      No, wait, that was Cicero. My bad.

dhruvtv 13 years ago

Nailed it.

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