These two words are not the same thing ....

[davidgillon]

 I was reading some German wiki pages yesterday, and dumped them through 1) the translation feature in Chrome and 2) Google translate itself because I'm lazy, and because I was pretty sure the in-Chrome option had screwed up over and beyond the garbled sentence structure - which was much worse than usual.

In both cases 'sprengwerk' was translated as 'explosive structure', which given the page was talking about installing some lockers in the underframe of a railway car struck me as unlikely to be right. So I went and checked a german dictionary, 'trusswork'. 

'Explosive structure', 'trusswork', these two things are not the same.

Actual sentence: 'Dazu musste das Sprengwerk entsprechend angepasst werden.' 

Actual translation: 'To do this, the explosive structure had to be adjusted accordingly.'

Honestly, any time you jump to 'explosive structure' as your first option is probably going to be wrong.
 

Comments

[hilarita]

Google Translate seems to be getting worse again. The last few times I've used it it has: missed out a word in the sentence; ignored the use of the future tense; missed out a word in the sentence. Those word omissions aren't the usual type (e.g. you're moving from a language that uses articles a lot to one that doesn't, or encodes superlatives by inflection), but sort of more like "I went very fast" -> "I went fast."
It's not produced anything obviously spectacularly wrong, but it's not got it right either.

[davidgillon]

It's really been mangling the German sentences I've been throwing at it this week, and they aren't especially difficult, I can translate them manually and my German's not great (I'm just too lazy to translate an entire page). But the sentences it's falling over on are ones where you definitely need to get to the end of the sentence to get the verb and work back through it to get the English ordering, and instead it's splitting those sentences into two or three separate clauses and doing them individually, which generates drivel. I've seen entire clauses missed and meanings reversed, which makes me wonder if they've changed something in the engine that's devalued time-manner-place orderings.

It's worse in the version built into Chrome, which I presume is using the same engine in the background, because that's clearly trying to translate some of the HTML, and that just shouldn't happen. I'm also not sure if it isn't sometimes processing the odd linebreak tag or new line character as an end of sentence, when there's clearly a need to discard those in webpages.

Example translation from one of the pages I was looking at:

"The standard equipment wagons[1], later standard auxiliary equipment wagons< /span>[ 1], which replaced the previous auxiliary trains on the German Federal Railroad.auxiliary train until the 2010s. Together with the medical wagon, the standard equipment wagons formed the two-car Deutsche Bahn and were used by [1]Deutsche Bundesbahn that were equipped with tools, equipment, units and rerailing equipment to eliminate the consequences of accidents . They were built in the 1960s for the rail service vehicles, were [3][2])EHG 388 ("

And I just noticed that of two occurrences of Deutsche Bundesbahn it translated one but not the other, so we're not even getting consistency at the proper noun level.

[green_knight]

I had no idea what 'Sprengwerk' means, so I googled it. The German page is pretty thorough, but the most interesting thing is that the English page linked on the page for 'Sprengwerk' is 'rigid-frame bridge'.

And yes, it is based on a meaning of 'sprengen' which I hadn't known, and it's more interesting than that: 'sprengen' mostly means to destroy with force, but also to use a sprinkler (not what came to mind, but fair do), and to drive animals out of their burrows with dogs, and to move lively and with force (this is archaic, sometimes said of horses. 'Springbrunnen', and indead the english 'spring' [water] are related. 'Absprengen', on the other hand means to separate with force, and here we come to the etymology of 'Sprengwerk': the force is pushed onto the angled supports (trusses?).

Learnt something today!