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> it makes sense to have someone on the team knowledgeable about the language while doing translations

Speaking about translations, I had. Laughable experience when I was experimenting with Google translate API a few years ago, when I picked some random text about solar system from Wikipedia that reads something like “Mercury is a planet of the solar system”, when translated to Arabic, it read “الزئبق هو أحد كواكب المجموعة الشمسية” , apparently, it was not be able to infer the meaning of “Mercury” from the context.



When I translate that with safari it comes back as ‘mercury is one of the planets in the solar system’?


In Arabic, Mercury (planet) and mercury (element) are two different words (عطارد and زئبق), here the machine translation is using the wrong mercury for the context.


This is the problem with machine translation, often a round trip gets you back something that looks reasonable.

Some of them let you click on each word and see which it picked, but that doesn't always work.


"Quicksilver is one of the planets in the solar system."




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