Google Translate Forks Up

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Originally published at: Google Translate Forks Up - TidBITS

At the Pew Research Center’s Decoded blog, Anna Brown writes:

We routinely ask the people who take our surveys to give us feedback about their experience. Were the survey questions clear? Were they engaging? Were they politically neutral? While we get a wide range of feedback on our surveys, we were surprised by a comment we received on an online survey in 2024: “You misspelled YES with FORKS numerous times.”

The story about how Pew Research tracked down this bug is both hilarious and illustrative of how complex our tech world has become. It arose from several interconnected problems: a lightbox popup for survey instructions that triggered an automatic browser translation feature and a bizarre error in Google Translate that caused it to translate what it thought was the Spanish word “yes” into “forks” in English.

Good thing James Joyce wasn’t writing Ulysses with these tools or Molly Bloom’s final soliloquy might have seemed even more explicit (tip of the hat to Joseph S. Barrera III):

I was a Flower of the mountain forks when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red forks and how he kissed me under the Moorish Wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again forks and then he asked me would I forks to say forks my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him forks and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume forks and his heart was going like mad and forks I said forks I will Forks.

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I experienced this exact same issue with Google Chrome in a previous cybersecurity job. For some reason, for only one user accessing an internal, web-based app, it replaced an acronym a different, totally unrelated word. The acronym would reveal what kind of proprietary application it was, so, to be more generic, I just plugged “FHIR”, a common healthcare API into Google Translate, where it says it is the Irish word, “MAN” (which gives a completely new meaning to the phrase “FHIR interface”).

The user assumed the application had been hacked and contacted a C-suite member who got our CISO involved. We assembled an incident response, took everything offline while investigating, and, after poring through source codes and security logs, it turned out to be exactly what was described here.

And of course, this all occurred on a Sunday.

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