Are Lithuanians – Russians? Google it
Published 08 October, 2008, 17:43
An Internet scandal, involving Internet giant Google, could aggravate already tense relations between the Baltic states and their Russian-speaking population. A new Lithuanian translation site launched by Google currently makes mistakes the country’s citizens call offensive: for example, it says Lithuanians are Russians.
For instance, the engine translates the Lithuanian sentence “Aš esu Lietuvis” (“I’m Lithuanian”) as “I am Russian”. The translator also substitutes the capital of Lithuania, Vilnius, by neighbouring Latvian main city Riga.
However, some of these mistakes probably shouldn’t be ascribed to some hacker attacks or political ‘jokes’ of the online interpreter developers: some users say one of the problems is that the engine so far fails to recognise diacritical marks, and leaves many people lost in translation.
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