However, in most cases we shouldn’t translate proper nouns.

That’s why, for once, Spanish movie translators did well in translating this character’s name for ‘Gandalf el Gris’ and ‘Gandalf el Blanco’. If you’re a Lord of the Rings fan, you’ll know how important it is for Gandalf the Grey to become later Gandalf the White. For example, when a fictional character’s name defines something about his personality. Proper nouns should only be translated in very specific cases. The result? A target text stating that some fish spend most of their time being schooled. However, Google Translate does not quite grasp the difference. The word school refers not only to a teaching organization, like don Quijote Spanish schools, but also to a large number of fish swimming together in the same direction. But, as you can see in the example below, that doesn’t always work.

When a word has multiple meanings, Google Translate chooses one according to the information given in the rest of the sentence. Without the right context, polysemy can be a great challenge for translation machines, especially in short text strings. Switch to the human-translated Spanish version of this post. Do you want to know why? Keep on reading to discover some of the funniest Google Translate Fails in Spanish and why they can’t (yet) be avoided. Google Translate or DeepL are some of the most popular machine translation services on the Internet.Īlthough the machine translation market size is expected to grow worldwide in the next years, as Statista data shows, Google Translate will never achieve the efficiency of human-powered translation. Often abbreviated as MT, it refers to automated software that can translate text inputs from one language to another.

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