Phil Robinson Posted January 2, 2018 Share Posted January 2, 2018 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? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spacecadet Posted January 2, 2018 Share Posted January 2, 2018 Blimey, yer right. 78% distro. Still non-English-speaking countries tend to prefer their own distros. But I take your point. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wiskerke Posted January 2, 2018 Share Posted January 2, 2018 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 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vpics Posted January 3, 2018 Share Posted January 3, 2018 I mentioned it a while ago. Atrocious. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vpics Posted January 3, 2018 Share Posted January 3, 2018 Oh, and Alamy Live News is translated as Alamy Leben Nachrichten. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil Robinson Posted January 3, 2018 Author Share Posted January 3, 2018 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........ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joern Sackermann Posted January 3, 2018 Share Posted January 3, 2018 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. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vpics Posted January 3, 2018 Share Posted January 3, 2018 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. :-) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cryptoprocta Posted January 3, 2018 Share Posted January 3, 2018 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. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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