Perdido En La Traducción
Today my kids had to choose between virtual and socially-distanced on-campus learning for this fall semester (thanks COVID-19). The selection process involved picking their high school from a drop-down on the district website. Oddly we couldn’t initially find their school (Del Norte) in the list.
Why not? Well, it turns out that Google Chrome’s auto-translate feature was attempting to be helpful, and transformed it into “From North”. Which made me realize three things:
- I’m really thankful to be techie and able to debug such issues, because I imagine this will cause confusion for those less clued-in to potential browser oddities.
- It’s really hard for computers to do be “smartly” helpful in a transparent way; if an algorithm isn’t darn near perfect it’s likely to do more harm than good.
- The implementor should have added
translate=noto their<html>tag to avoid this problem altogether.