A company spokesperson clarified that the translator is not “filtering” private conversations and that Google does not have access to that type of information.
One of Google's most used tools is its translator. Although sometimes it is not usually so exact with its translations, this is, without a doubt, a huge help when it comes to resolving doubts about the language. However, what some Reddit users discovered a few months ago and which became widespread a few weeks ago, exceeds what was expected.
As shown in hundreds of screenshots, which multiplied over the days, the Google application began to show strange messages when netizens began to write different patterns of syllables or words translated from Somali and Hawaiian, to Spanish or English.
According to what was published by users, some of the phrases displayed on the platforms include “prophetic” messages, threats and some meaningless sequences of words.
Read here: "The surprise alert about the end of the world that Google Translate throws up"
As expected, these phrases - and many more that were deleted days after the Internet users found them - caused a stir on the Internet, forcing Google to give a response.
Justin Burr, spokesperson for the brand, told Vice's Motherboard portal that they are just "dumb" answers to "dumb" searches . “This is simply a function of introducing nonsense into the system, which creates nonsense,” he asserted.
In the same way, he assured that the translator is not “filtering” private conversations and that Google does not have access to that type of information.
For his part, Alexander Rush, a computer language expert at Harvard, explained that this happens through a system called “neural automatic translation,” which manages to translate phrases with the help of the same netizens who surf the web. However, misuse of the translation suggestions or comments option can cause this system to fail and return these types of results.
Sean Colbath, a scientist at the high-tech company BBN Technologies, said that the translator is likely to resort to biblical texts when searching in the Somali language and that it is not unusual for the application to return strange results when it comes to languages that have less words -compared to others- like Somali, Hawaiian and Maori.
Finally, the Google spokesperson did not respond to the site when asked if it was a bad joke by its workers or if, in fact, the translator bases some of its results on the Bible.
Although the brand has already withdrawn its most robust “apocalyptic” messages – when you typed “dog” 19 times, a text referring to the end of the world appeared – you can still take the test by writing repetitive syllables in the translator.
