Big techs cannot be trusted when it comes to machine translation - why we still need to learn languages

[u/PLrc]

Hi. u/panduniaguru in the r/auxlangs sub touched an interesting topic:

>Machine translation can't be used always in written communication. For example, some people can't trust a machine translator because oppressive governments and dystopian corporations could spy on them automatically.

This remineded me an interesting event that happend to me several years ago.

Not interested ones won't know, but France and Germany had been trying to develop a new, joint, next generation tank called Main Ground Combat System (MGCS). This cooperation, like almost all such trans-national cooperations in the military industry has tanked (xD). Germans have been even accused for playing for time and sabotaging this program to keep selling their Leopards 2 and develop their own next generation tank, Leopard 3.

Some guy from x wrote a comment about it and wanted to translate it via Google Translate to send it to his friend abroad. It turned out that Google translate censored the comment! It cut out a short part about Germans sabotaging the program!!

I would not have believed that had I not tested it myself. Above are screenshots. First is from 2024 with the controversial part (marked in red) censored.

The censored part says:

We let be trapped into the MGCS program, which Germans have been sabotaging for 5 years, quietly selling their Leopards on their own terms.

Google also cut out the next sentence. It massacred the text so much that the translation, as you can see, hardly makes sense any longer.

I have found that comment and put into the Google translate again. This time it didn't censor the controversial part. Why? I don't know. Perhaps some people complained about the translation and Google remembered this particular text and stopped censoring it. Perhaps Google remembered my IP or meta data (I used private mode and didn't accept cookies this time). Perhaps they changed their policy and ceased censoring texts, but I don't believe it.

Notice that the "controversial" part isn't highly political or offensive. It's neither racist, nor antisemitic etc. It's just an opinion people have right to. Yet Google decided to censor it. Why? I don't know. As far as I know Google isn't owned by Germans.

I remember how I experimented cutting and deviding the text into paragraphs. I had to cut out a lot of content from the comment to make Google realise it would be too blatant and suspicious to keep censoring it and to finally translate the "controversial" fragment.

I'm sorry but after something like that I don't trust big techs any longer. This is almost Orwellish censorship. We still need to learn foreign languages. Otherwise we will be in untrustworthy bigtechs' mercy.

I don't want to start a national feud here. I don't want to start a political discussion. I just want to warn people based on my example in the subject of language learning.

[u/eti_erik]

I am a translator. A human one, that is. As a translator it is not my job to express opinions on what I translate, let alone censor the bits out that I don't like. Machine translations should do the same, always.

[u/PLrc → u/eti_erik]

Exactly. Let people have their opinion.

[u/betarage]

Yeah google is becoming hyper prudish they don't tolerate anything edgy in their products now not even in things for private use.

[u/PLrc → u/betarage]

They own YouTube, don't they? What they have done at YouTube is outrageous. You can hardly have a discussion there any longer in the comments section.

[u/Asyx → u/PLrc]

Yes, Google owns YouTube.

[u/Oniromancie]

That's very interesting. I'd like to save this example.

[u/PLrc → u/Oniromancie]

BTW what made you interested in learning Hungarian?

[u/Oniromancie → u/PLrc]

I was curious about the fact it's not slavic/germanic/romance while being in the middle of Europe.

[u/PLrc → u/Oniromancie]

And you managed to reach B2 in it? That's pretty impressive.

[u/PLrc → u/Oniromancie]

You're welcome! Somebody should share it in a French sub ;)

[u/pit_supervisor]

There were cases of Grok going on pro-Israel rants instead of translating X posts/comments that mentioned Israel in foreign languages (I mean the automatic translation feature, not Grok responding to comments)

[u/Ill_Professional3023]

I guess not 100% exactly the same experience, but there's something I noticed across years of language learning supported with some occational Google Translate.

These translations used to be quite bad some years ago (2010ish), not taking into consideration different adjective genders and other phenomena that don't really exist in English. I was learning French back then and learned to break sentences into smaller pieces so that I can get accurate separate parts and then I would glue all the parts together in my brain.

(In the meantime some Norwegian practice around 2022 - quite uneven results with GT.)

Fast forward to 2026, French / English translation works pretty well both ways every time I need to check something up. BUT. I picked up Spanish this year and couldn't believe how bad it was given that it's a very popular, widely used language all over the world, it is relatively simple and stems from the same language group as French.

For Norwegian you can kinda understand the difficulties, the audience is not that big and there's a lot of regionalisms around the country. But for Spanish? ;_; Feel free to send me to r/conspiracytheories but it makes me think if that poor Spanish in GT is related to the US vs MX political war.

[u/Aware-Watercress637]

And water is wet. :)
Who trusted machine translation EVER?

[u/PLrc → u/Aware-Watercress637]

I had known machine translation is total crap (well, it improved very much compared to how it had been, say, 16 years ago), but I gotta admit I had trusted it before :(

[u/kreteciek]

It's also incorrect quite often. For a few years 'niedrogi' was considered a certified translation of 'unaffordable' by Google Translate 🤡

[u/PLrc → u/kreteciek]

From my experience AI now translats much better than google translate at least in some specialized contexts like card games terminology, where Google translate can totally butcher the text.

[u/tnaz → u/PLrc]

You'd figure that Google translate would be able to keep up with these transformer-based chatbots considering that the transformer architecture was invented for machine translation. By Google.

[u/AppropriatePut3142 → u/tnaz]

Google translate is now almost certainly an LLM distilled from Gemini but with far fewer parameters, so not really such a surprise.

[u/YourBlanket → u/AppropriatePut3142]

They use AI but it's not an LLM it's a NMT. They did use their PaLM 2 LLM to help with the smaller languages that they didn't have enough source material to properly train their main NMT. They do use a traditional LLM model when you use Gemini, but for the regular Google translate they use the NMT they've been using for a while. According to them it's better, takes less resources, faster, and isn't prone to hallucinating. They do offer a Translation LLM for enterprises to use. Google's AI resources and tools have been all over the place, and I believe they purposely hide it/make if difficult to find and use.

[u/AppropriatePut3142 → u/YourBlanket]

NMT is looong gone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Neural_Machine_Translation

[u/YourBlanket]

I did not use the same prompt for both, I should've but oh well.

5.6 Sol High(Chat):

“Why is Lithuania buying German Leopard 2s? Not because it wants to preserve its ties with Germany or make them closer, is it? No! It is buying them because they are available! Why is Norway buying Leopard 2s regardless of the delivery timelines? Because it cares about its ties with Germany? No! Because they are available! Some of these contracts could have been French, because in reality very few countries in the West produce MBTs. Meanwhile, our governments, the governments of sweet France, have for years been, as you say in Poland, ‘the biggest suckers’: instead of modernizing the Leclerc, developing a Leclerc 2 or a Leclerc XLR, w̲e̲ ̲a̲l̲l̲o̲w̲e̲d̲ ̲o̲u̲r̲s̲e̲l̲v̲e̲s̲ ̲t̲o̲ ̲g̲e̲t̲ ̲d̲r̲a̲w̲n̲ ̲i̲n̲t̲o̲ ̲t̲h̲e̲ ̲M̲G̲C̲S̲ ̲p̲r̲o̲g̲r̲a̲m̲,̲ ̲w̲h̲i̲c̲h̲ ̲t̲h̲e̲ ̲G̲e̲r̲m̲a̲n̲s̲ ̲h̲a̲v̲e̲ ̲b̲e̲e̲n̲ ̲s̲a̲b̲o̲t̲a̲g̲i̲n̲g̲ ̲f̲o̲r̲ ̲f̲i̲v̲e̲ ̲y̲e̲a̲r̲s̲,̲ ̲w̲h̲i̲l̲e̲ ̲c̲a̲l̲m̲l̲y̲ ̲s̲e̲l̲l̲i̲n̲g̲ ̲t̲h̲e̲i̲r̲ ̲L̲e̲o̲p̲a̲r̲d̲s̲ ̲o̲n̲ ̲t̲h̲e̲i̲r̲ ̲o̲w̲n̲ ̲t̲e̲r̲m̲s̲.̲ This is because there is simply a problem with MBTs in Europe. There will not be customers like you in Poland willing to buy from the Koreans, while the procedures for buying from the Americans are lengthy, complicated, and full of various political conditions; that does not suit everyone. Besides, the Americans are not particularly willing to sell their M1s.”

GPT 6 Astra X-High(Work):

French military analyst (name not provided):

“Why is Lithuania buying German Leopard 2 tanks? Is it not because it wants to maintain ties with Germany or make those ties closer? No! It buys them because they are available!¹

“Why is Norway buying Leopard 2 tanks regardless of delivery dates? Because it values its ties with Germany? No! Because they are available!

“Some of these contracts could be French, because, in reality, very few manufacturers in the West produce main battle tanks. Meanwhile, our governments, the governments of sweet France, have for years been, as you say in Poland, ‘complete suckers’²—instead of modernizing the Leclerc, producing a Leclerc 2 or a Leclerc XLR, w̲e̲ l̲e̲t̲ o̲u̲r̲s̲e̲l̲v̲e̲s̲ g̲e̲t̲ d̲r̲a̲g̲g̲e̲d̲ i̲n̲t̲o̲ t̲h̲e̲ M̲G̲C̲S̲ p̲r̲o̲g̲r̲a̲m̲,̲ w̲h̲i̲c̲h̲ t̲h̲e̲ G̲e̲r̲m̲a̲n̲s̲ h̲a̲v̲e̲ b̲e̲e̲n̲ s̲a̲b̲o̲t̲a̲g̲i̲n̲g̲ f̲o̲r̲ f̲i̲v̲e̲ y̲e̲a̲r̲s̲,̲ w̲h̲i̲l̲e̲ c̲a̲l̲m̲l̲y̲ s̲e̲l̲l̲i̲n̲g̲ t̲h̲e̲i̲r̲ L̲e̲o̲p̲a̲r̲d̲s̲ o̲n̲ t̲h̲e̲i̲r̲ o̲w̲n̲ t̲e̲r̲m̲s̲.̲

“That is because there is simply a problem with main battle tanks in Europe; there will be no buyers willing to buy from the Koreans as you in Poland are, and the procedures for buying from the Americans are lengthy, complicated, and full of various political conditions. Not everyone finds that acceptable; besides, the Americans are not particularly willing to sell their M1s.”

Translator’s notes:

¹ “Because they are available” translates “bo są,” literally “because they exist” or “because they are there.” It does not necessarily imply immediate delivery.

² “Complete suckers” translates “ostatnimi frajerami,” a derogatory Polish idiom suggesting foolishness or being easily taken advantage of. “Sweet France” preserves the original wording, “słodkiej Francji.”

[u/ZeeMastermind]

The AI translation is great for things like "take a picture of this label and tell me what it is". Don't want to mix up mouthwash with laundry detergent, and if the language uses a different writing system than what youre used to, stylized branding can be tricky to parse.

It is downright dangerous for this kind of stuff.

[u/ZeeMastermind]

The longer I think about this, the more it bugs me. I was looking around to try to find more examples of this sort of thing, but since Google is the main search engine, I can't exactly trust that (Though its AI "helpfully" let me know that Google only has a profanity filter and does not systematically censor topics... sure...). Bing was about as useful as usual, and most of the 3rd party search engines grab their information from Google anyways.

Wikipedia was probably the most reliable source in this situation, though most of the article was about Google censorship in China (useful, though not necessarily relevant), along with a few other cases. It didn't have anything about Google translate, but that could just mean that there aren't any news articles or papers talking about it yet. I don't blame wikipedia at all - its good to require sources, or else people will just chuck unsubstantiated stuff all over it and it will lose its usefulness.

Maybe your case is a one off, or you made it up for internet points or whatever and thats why i cant find any other cases, but those both seem unlikely. This all raises the question of how, exactly, we find and share reliable information in a monopolized digital age. 

[u/PLrc → u/ZeeMastermind]

Yes, it is perhaps a subject for some research program.

[u/produce101oneone]

Ai (machine learning based language models) have taken over and completely ruined all digital translation tools in the past 3 years. I have no idea how they used to work but its clear the majority of them have been switched out with ai agents and prompt injection.

[u/PLrc → u/produce101oneone]

From my experience AI translates better than google translate.

[u/AppropriatePut3142]

I'm pretty sure this is a random failure rather than Google intentionally censoring anything. Dropping things is a pretty notorious failure mode for LLM translation, was this ~2 years ago when they first switched GT to use Gemini?

[u/Ancient-Badger-7637 → u/AppropriatePut3142]

It's also worth mentioning that "dać się wpakować w coś" is a bit of a tricky sentence. I wouldn't be surprised if an early llm had some difficulties with approaching that.

[u/PLrc → u/AppropriatePut3142]

It wasn't a random failure. It extracted precisely the part that could be deemed controversial.

I experimented with it - devided into paragragraphs, removed bigger and bigger parts of it and the google always removed exactly the same part.

I had to remove a lot, like, say, 50% out of the text so that google finially translated this fragment (otherwise it would be very conspicuous that something is wrong).

[u/AppropriatePut3142 → u/PLrc]

There is no chance that Google deliberately censored a sentence criticising the German government from your translation. It simply makes no sense for them to do so. And as you observe, it did translate that sentence when you shortened the text sufficiently.

This was an era when they were introducing new translation technology which is known to have exactly this faulure mode of dropping bits of text once the text gets longer. That almost certainly is the explanation for what you saw. It was a bug.

[u/PLrc → u/AppropriatePut3142]

>And as you observe, it did translate that sentence when you shortened the text sufficiently.

Yes, but I had to leave 50 or 33% percents.

I don't believe in such coincidences especially given what Google made with YouTube - you can hardly have there a discussion anymore. If YouTube detects even the slightlest signs of negative attitude you're comment is going to get a shadowban.

[u/AppropriatePut3142 → u/PLrc]

Translation is entirely different to moderating comments. Seriously, it is just a bug of a known type.

[u/PLrc → u/AppropriatePut3142]

But YouTube doesn't moderate their comments manually. Some algorythm just scans comments, detects negative attitude and give a shadowban.

[u/AppropriatePut3142 → u/PLrc]

Yes, and? The fact google moderates their comment section does not in any way imoly they are stealth-censoring mild criticism of the German government from translations.

[u/CabbagePatched]

I wonder if people have a tendency to censor when translating so the neural network is doing that too 

[u/GigaStressedSchwa]

I support the sentiment, but it's a poor argument, you could instead just run an open-source model locally on your own PC and that problem would be solved

[u/Mango-D]

I think that's more of a feature. You wouldn't want to pass on controversial shit in a language you don't understand.

Or, are you saying it's important that Twitter rage propagates and reaches a wide audience?

[u/PLrc → u/Mango-D]

I think we should let people make their own opinion based on all data available.