Google Translate Is a Fertile Ground for Pranksters

Google Translate is a great tool and it can come in very handy in plenty of situations. If you need some lyrics translated or understand what some obscure, foreign language website is saying, there's no faster alternative. But there are better ones.

Automated translation is good for quick and dirty work, but it won't replace professional translators any time soon.

Google and everyone else interested in the field are working on improving it though. Normally, machine translation learns by comparing books, articles and other written works that have been already translated by humans.

This though requires a huge volume of works to get the best results. So Google turns to a readily available resource, its users. If you feel that a translation could be better, you can easily suggest an alternative or pick from the ones Google has already chosen.

This works great if users genuinely want to help make Google Translate better, sometimes though, it may not be the best idea. Especially for more obscure words or phrases, for which there is little data, a handful of people up to no good can trick Google into providing an erroneous but most of the times funny translation.

One example, though hardly the only one, is the Romanian translation for "JUST BECAUSE" which Google says is "Gigi Becali," actually the name of well known though rather controversial figure in the country.

If you click on the translation, you get the alternative "Lui Gigi Becali," not really an improvement. You will also notice there's an input box, used to suggest better translations, which is how pranksters manipulated Google Translate in the first place.

Of course, it could just as well be a bizarre error on part of Google Translate, though it's a bit unlikely.

Note that writing without the caps, "just because," will actually provide an accurate translation. And this type of pranks and errors do eventually get fixed.

Not all Google Translated manipulations come from the users though. Designed as an Easter Egg, if you choose German to German translation and fill in certain letter sequences you can get Translate to beatbox for you. The Listen button even changes to say "Beatbox," so it's clearly an inside job.