I have been learning Arabic for two years now, after one of my earlier startups had a large group of developers in Egypt. Although I’m new, I found something very strange in today’s Google Keynote: some languages on the slide … wrong?
The Arabic text reads “Sudanese”, but it is mispronounced and raises eyebrows among Arabic speakers. Swiss German (commonly pronounced “Schweizerdeutsch”) is written as a native dialect trying to follow a dialect (you can type “what if” to try to follow the Canadian pronunciation, but this is generally not possible).
It is not clear whether the Google Translate team tried to be clever and show some local knowledge by writing in local dialect, but it seems strange. Regardless, more translations will be available by placing any of these translations in Google Translate, rather than the translations on the slide by Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Very confusing.
Archer Puts well:
If Google wants to do it right, it has to go through something like “Sudani” or “Sudani”. This is clearly a different world from the final version on the slide.
Moreover, other languages written in non-Latin scripts are unrecognizably distorted: the Urdu translation is meaningless, and there are many moments of facial relief. Sam He broke it in this tweet:
Google Translate is undoubtedly a powerful tool to get the gist of an article or some words, but it is very strange to see all the errors in one part of the presentation. If you want to see some of the best language activation moments in the Google IO presentation, YouTube has your support.
Thanks to my friend Ashraf Report to this section for further assistance.
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