It’s possible that the sinister messages are the result of disgruntled Google employees, for instance, or that mischievous users are abusing the “Suggest an edit” button, which accepts suggestions for better translations of a given text.Īlexander Rush, an assistant professor at Harvard who studies natural language processing and computer translation, said that internal quality filters would probably catch that type of manipulation, however. There are several possible explanations for the strange outputs. When Motherboard provided Google with an example of the eerie messages, its translation disappeared from Google Translate. “This is simply a function of inputting nonsense into the system, to which nonsense is generated.” “Google Translate learns from examples of translations on the web and does not use ‘private messages’ to carry out translations, nor would the system even have access to that content,” said Justin Burr, a Google spokesperson, in an email.
Users on a subreddit called TranslateGate have speculated that some of the strange outputs might be drawn from text gathered from emails or private messages. On Twitter, people have blamed the strange translations on ghosts and demons.
