Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2018 August 2

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August 2

株式会社リコーKabushiki-gaisha Rikō

The name of the Ricoh company, according to the wiki article, is 株式会社リコーKabushiki-gaisha Rikō.

株式会社リコー is translated by Google translate as Ricoh Company, Ltd. But Kabushiki-gaisha Rikō remains Kabushiki-gaisha Rikō.

However Google translates Kabushiki-gaisha Riko as Happy birthday party.

How come they are so different? --Doroletho (talk) 16:42, 2 August 2018 (UTC)

Because Google translate is shit. See Google Translate#Limitations. --Jayron32 19:12, 2 August 2018 (UTC)

Agreed. But sometimes there are explanations about why things went wrong. For example, 'Mr Stone' is 'Sr Stone' in the Spanish translation, which is correct, but 'Herr Stein' in the German one. You can speculate whether the German one was fed less examples, and therefore translated 'stone' literally. Or maybe the Spanish translation is better because Spanish differentiates between 'piedra' as a stone, and 'Piedra' as a surname, contrary to German, which writes both the same.

'Kabushiki' is stock, 'gaisha' is foreign car, 'riko' alone is translated as self-interest. How did this become 'happy birthday party'--Doroletho (talk) 20:38, 2 August 2018 (UTC)

Don't know. Kabu 株 means "stump". Or rather, it can mean "stump". 会社 can be pronounced gaisha; gaisha can mean "foreign-made car"; however, 会社 cannot mean "foreign-made car". Any human who knows even a little (more or less contemporary) Japanese will know that 株式会社 means a certain kind of company (and has nothing to do with stumps, let alone foreign-made cars or parties). Google Translate now tells me that 株式会社リコー means "Ricoh Company, Ltd"; but yes, that "Kabushiki-gaisha Riko" is "Happy birthday party". We all have our different search bubbles, but in mine the most conspicuous Japanese company whose name is spelt "Riko" is this one, which is no more closely related to birthdays or parties than Ricoh is. -- Hoary (talk) 23:22, 2 August 2018 (UTC)

Google translate has a Suggest an edit option where "Your contribution will be used to improve translation quality and may be shown to users anonymously". Perhaps somebody did that as a joke, or something? 2606:A000:1126:4CA:0:98F2:CFF6:1782 (talk) 07:45, 3 August 2018 (UTC)

Maybe it's possible to troll using Google translate. I remember that some time ago the translation for "I'm a flat-earther." into French was "Je suis un fou." So, if you submit enough times a silly translation from different computers and accounts, maybe Google will believe you.--Doroletho (talk) 12:04, 3 August 2018 (UTC)

The issue with Google Translate, is that it depends on machine learning, and the quality of its translations depends solely on the corpus of existing text it has been able to analyze to come up with a reasonable translation. For translations like, say, English-Spanish, it's really good because that kind of translation happens all the time; there's lots of text out there for it to analyze. For translating from transliterated Korean to English, there's not much of it to learn from, so it screws up a lot more. --Jayron32 15:23, 3 August 2018 (UTC)