I’ve been studying Arabic for a few years now, after working with a large-ish team of Egyptian devs at a prior firm. The speech at Google I/O today had something very weird in it, and I’m only a novice. The slide has a lot of incorrect languages on it.
It is spelled incorrectly and in a script that raises an eyebrow or two among Arabic speakers, but the Arabic text reads “Sudanese Language.” If you write “What’s That All About” in an attempt to replicate a Canadian accent, you can do so — but it’s not normally done. Swiss German, which is spelled as “Schweizerdeutsch,” is written in what appears to be a local dialect trying to emulate an accent.
Although it’s not apparent if the Google Translate team was playing a trick on us here by writing in local accents, it does feel a little weird. On any case, any of these translations may be entered into Google Translate, and the results are more accurate than the ones that appeared in Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s slide. Amazingly perplexing.
According to Google, “Sudanese dialect” or perhaps “Sudanese slang” would have been a more accurate description of what was going on. Compared to the slide copy, it’s a world of difference in quality.
On top of that, a number of non-Latin scripted languages are completely unreadable: The Urdu translation is illogical, and there are several other laughable passages. Sam explains it in a tweet:
In spite of the fact that Google Translate is a sophisticated tool, it’s strange to see so many problems concentrated in one area of the presentation. Google IO’s presentation contains a particularly amusing linguistic moment, which you can watch in its entirety on YouTube.
