Every wondered why you don't get direct sales to Germany?

[Phil Robinson]

I've never been a fan of translating software, especially for individual words (eg keywords / tags) for the simple reason that it doesn't work.
Now Alamy has a German website, software is used for this purpose and I have started noticing some effects it's been having on captions. 
Jacob Reese Mogg has become Jakob, for example, 

Theresa May is now Theresa kann.

Former shadow education secretary has become Ed Kugeln (think about it)

and 'Theresa May attends the Conservative Conference' becomes

'Theresa besucht Mai der konservativen Konferenz' ('Theresa visits May (the month) the conservative conference'.)

 

If you do a search for 'Milan' (not the Italian city, but German for Kite, the bird) you get dozens of images of kids playing with kites (the toy)

A search for 'Trinkgeld' (the tip you give to a waiter) brings up images of white tipped sharks, felt-tipped pens, orange tip butterflies and the sharp points of pencils.
 

The grammar of some of the captions is nonsensical.

 

Any German members out there who have spent more time examining it?

 

 

 

Edited January 2, 2018 by Phil Robinson

[spacecadet]

Blimey, yer right. 78% distro.

Still non-English-speaking countries tend to prefer their own distros. But I take your point.

Edited January 2, 2018 by spacecadet

[wiskerke]

However the distributors use machine translating also.

 

My guess is that buyers can be quite faithful to an agency.

Or used to a certain search engine. Or preferring a certain search engine.

 

So is all else being equal?

 

wim

[vpics]

I mentioned it a while ago. Atrocious. 

[vpics]

Oh, and Alamy Live News is translated as Alamy Leben Nachrichten. 

[Phil Robinson]

Many years ago I, like others here I suspect, contributed to a now defunct agency who were hopeless BUT when keywording uploaded images you had to chose the meaning of each from a list of synonyms, so the translation software knew how to translate them.
It meant a lot of work, but at least the translations were accurate. 

Though they did, as I mentioned, go bust so........

[Joern Sackermann]

In Septmeber 2017, I wrote an email to the memberservice, alerting them to these dreadful translations. They told me that this is still being worked on, but nothing has happened since then.

[vpics]

50 minutes ago, Joern Sackermann said:

In Septmeber 2017, I wrote an email to the memberservice, alerting them to these dreadful translations. They told me that this is still being worked on, but nothing has happened since then.

 

Did you mention that the Germans were very fussy about their language. :-)

[Cryptoprocta]

5 hours ago, Phil Robinson said:

Many years ago I, like others here I suspect, contributed to a now defunct agency who were hopeless BUT when keywording uploaded images you had to chose the meaning of each from a list of synonyms, so the translation software knew how to translate them.
It meant a lot of work, but at least the translations were accurate. 

Though they did, as I mentioned, go bust so........

One of the micros has a CV which then translates into eight languages.

It works very well, but (like here) it is too often hijacked by spammers.