Don't Trust Google Translate

Google Translate can be a wonderful tool if you're learning a language, and in fact, I use it all the time whenever there's a word I want to look up or a text in a foreign language that I want to get the gist of. But like Wikipedia, it is not something I would rely on if I were going to do anything important, like give a deposition, write a newspaper article, or submit an assignment for a grade. Nevertheless, I continually have students hand in papers that have obviously been written with the "assistance" of Google. It's usually very easy to spot. There will often be an advanced vocabulary word that is completely out of place and used incorrectly. I figure they don't know the actual meaning of the word, so I ask them where they got it from, and most of the time they confess that they simply Googled it. I have to remind them that Google is not always accurate, and even still, they shouldn't use words that they don't know. It's been a while, but I used to have students who would compose their entire essay in Arabic, then put it through Google translate to make it English. These essays always ended up being the most garbled, incoherent mess, that it was incredibly obvious that the student hadn't done the work properly.

All these examples have to do with students not using the tool for what it was intended for, but every now and then I come across examples that are quite humorous when Google Translate gets things completely wrong. For instance, today I wanted to see some of the differences between Czech and Slovak so I wrote out the sentence "Rád učím sa slovenčinu" (I like to learn Slovak). Google came back with "rád učim se češtinu," which means I like to learn Czech. I realize that the two languages are similar, but I find it curious that Google would use them interchangeably like that in the translation.

I've seen a couple other examples from the Hungarian news site hvg.hu. Since you'd have to know Hungarian to fully appreciate the original, I'll summarize it here. Apparently, last year, if you put the name of the famous Hungarian statesman "Kossuth Lajos" and translated it into English, it would come back with "Abraham Lincoln." Both are famous statesmen for sure, but clearly not the same person. I suppose Google got word of this because it no longer makes this mistake.

Another example from hvg.hu shows that Google apparently has a hard time staying up with current events. If you entered the French phrase "le président américain" (The American president), it would come back simply with "Bush." I checked, and it doesn't do this one anymore either, but it's still funny.

This kind of technology can be helpful when used as a starting point, but certainly not when a polished final product is expected. Sadly, it would appear that we're still years away from anything like a Babel fish or the TARDIS translation matrix. Does anyone else have examples of humorous mistranslations where Google gets it completely wrong? Comment and share if you do.

Update: I did some searching and found a few humorous ones on jackcola.org:

This is a quite funny one, but it kind of works for all names, but it suits Justin Bieber the best.
What to do: In Google Translator, convert the phrase “Will Justin Bieber ever hit puberty” from English to Vietnamese. Now take this text from Vietnamese, and convert it back to English. Have a read what it says.
Since this works for any name, I say it’s a little bug within Google Translator.