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Mistaken machine translations of 'ribbit' (2018) (kmjn.org)
16 points by mjn on May 14, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments



Animal sounds in different languages are weird in the first place.

Ducks go "Quack" in English, but "Coin" in French (sounds more like "kwan"), "mac" in Romanian and "rap" in Danish.

Horses go "vrink" in Danish and "gnagg" in Swedish.

And as for frogs... https://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uuuploads/anim...


Ducks go gua in Chinese. My bilingual toddler gets confused between English quack and Chinese gua.


Greek has funny animal noises. Dog: γάβ (yav - but pronounce the y as yearn). Chicken: πάκ πάκ πάκ (pak pak pak). Bird in general: τσίου (tsiou - pronounced kind of like chew).


deepl is much better than Google Translate.


Not in this case. Using "The frog croaks 'ribbit'." as an example sentence [0] with contextual clues, I only got translations that, when translated back, yielded either "rib", "rabbit" or "ribbon".

[0] https://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/7137639




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