‘If there is no sugar, will you take me to China’: Google Translator changes meaning of Rabindra Sangeet

May 6: Google’s free service “Google Translate” instantly translates words, phrases, and web pages between English and over 100 other languages. This is what Google claims. “Google Translate is a multilingual neural machine translation service developed by Google to translate text, documents and websites from one language into another.” Google launched this service 16 years ago on April 28, 2006. Google Translate at present claims to be capable of translating into 109 languages.

However, the translator seems to do at times very poor translation. Recently, one such translation of a Rabindra Sangeet from Bengali to English has become viral in social media. This particular translation has made “Google Translate” a laughing stock. Netizens have taken screen shot of it and are circulating the same in various social media platforms.

This is the song by Rabindranath Tagore which was translated from Bengali to English with the help of Google Translate:

“যদি তারে নাই চিনি গো
সে কি নেবে আমায় চিনে
এই নব ফাল্গুনের দিনে
জানি নে জানি নে”

The first two lines “যদি তারে নাই চিনি গো, সে কি নেবে আমায় চিনে” were infact translated using ‘Google Translate’. Ironically, Google Translate changed this into something which had no resemblance with the original sentence written by Tagore. This line was translated by Google Translate as: “If there is no sugar, will you take me to China.” Indeed very strange and meaningless translation! Infact, the literary meaning of the line written by Tagore in Bengali means “If I do not recognise him/her, can he/she recognise me?” But Google Maharaj added “Sugar” and “China” while translating and made it something which is ofcourse not palatable.

However, this is not the first time that that Google Translate has been seen to translate in a weird manner. Many a times in the past too, such meaningless translations have landed many netizens in an awkward situation. Especially, while translating from Bengali to English, Google failed innumerable times to do it correctly. The app seems to change the meaning and context to mean something else.