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I'm a writer, artist, and game developer. Currently working on Unknown Station Echo, a translation-based mystery.
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dog
@dog

Google Translate making up more weird stuff with the wrong language input


bruno
@bruno

First rule of modern software engineering: A computer program must never admit defeat. It's better to return garbled, random or incorrect output than throw an error.


aliengeo
@aliengeo

Italian > English Google Translate returns "beware of dog" for "cavec an em" and "cav e canem" because ignorant tourists see CAVECANEM on a mosaic and assume, this is Italy, it must be Italian—and Google Translate does nothing to correct that assumption. It doesn't even offer a correction for the spacing if you type "cavec an em" even though it's gibberish.

This has led to real people I know thinking it's an actual Italian phrase. Literally negative knowledge.

Of course, for common misconceptions like this based around specific historical artifacts, it would be more helpful to have a specific error thrown like

❗️ No Italian translation found
This is likely the Latin phrase cave canem, which means "beware of dog"
[insert example picture of mosaic]

But at the very least they should make the "did you mean..." WAY more prominent when it's garbage data for the target language, and not lie or hallucinate about its supposed meaning.


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in reply to @bruno's post:

Me making a game: Well if this disk read has fundamentally failed that's pretty much unrecoverable and something here should fail.

Console manufacturers: How dare your game ever crash, fail to function, or present errors even if it's hardware fault! Why don't you just fail gracefully and hide everything from the user that also can't actually meaningfully access a file system?