Machine Translation Doesn’t (Always?) Get It Right

The image I’m posting below is a screenshot from a Facebook application that has been machine-translated into Italian.

(edited on 01/04/12: I’m sorry, but this pic isn’t available anymore)

I found a translation particularly funny! It says: “Cerchi Sig. / Sig.ra DIRITTO?”. This is a word-for-word translation of “Are you looking for Mr. / Mrs. RIGHT?”. If you, like me, are a native speaker of Italian, or have a good knowledge of the language, you know that the English word “right” has several possible Italian translations:

• “Esatto”, “corretto”, “giusto” (“exact”, “correct”)
• “Giusto”, “opportuno” (“just”)
• “Diritto” (“right”, “ability”, like in “Women had to fight for the right to vote” => “Le donne dovettero/hanno dovuto lottare per il diritto al voto”)
• “Destra” (“right” as opposed to “left”, “sinistra” in Italian)
• Etc. (cf. Wordreference)

Given the context (informal) and the type of text (it is the title of an online test), a possible right translation of the sentence is “Cerchi il/la tipo/a giusto/a (per te)?”. I wouldn’t have translated “Mr. / Mrs.” with “Sig. / Sig.ra” (short forms for “Signore” => “Mister” and “Signora” => “Mistress”)  because, even if the sentence would be grammatically correct, “tipo/tipa” is a more natural translation, and “Sig. / Sig.ra” are used in formal contexts, as in letters (“Egregio Sig. XXX” => “Dear Mr. XXX”, “Gentile Sig.ra” => “Dear Madam”). Alternative translations might be “l’uomo / la donna” (“the man / woman”) or “il ragazzo / la ragazza” (“the boy / girl”), but I still prefer the first one.

This mistranslation reminded me of a video game included in Windows Vista, “Purble Place”. I have an Italian version of Vista, so the game is in Italian. I don’t know whether it was translated by a human translator or a machine, but when you get a character’s feature (and its colour) right in “Purble Shop”, a message saying “Colore destro“ appears.

(edited on 01/04/12: I’m sorry, but this pic isn’t available anymore)

You can clearly realize that it is a word-for-word translation of the English “right colour”. The right translation would be “colore giusto/esatto”. I don’t know the English version of the game, but I think that “3 caratteristiche giuste”  (“3 right features”) is correct. So, I suppose that the same word was translated in two different ways here, while the translation should have been the same in both cases.

You can find lots of other examples of Italian localization errors in the blog “Premere il tasto ANY”. The title is a deliberate mistranslation of the sentence “Press any key” (“Premere un tasto qualsiasi”).