#GOOGLE TRANSLATOR MANUAL#
#GOOGLE TRANSLATOR FREE#

One recent Urdu-language post on Twitter included a sentence that Mustafa Menai, who teaches Urdu at the University of Pennsylvania, translated as вЂњI have been spanked a lot and have also gathered a lot of love (from my parents).вЂќ In 2017, Facebook apologized after its machine-translation service translated a post by a Palestinian man that said вЂњgood morningвЂќ as вЂњhurt themвЂќ in English or вЂњattack themвЂќ in Hebrew.ДЄs a test, ProPublica asked language professors to copy and paste tweets written in casual language into Google Translate and compare the results with how they would interpret the tweets.

USCIS has stated that вЂњinformation collected from social media, by itself, will not be a basis to deny refugee resettlement.вЂќ вЂњI find it deeply disheartening and stupid and shortsighted, personally.вЂќДЄsked about the agencyвЂ™s use of machine translation tools, USCIS spokeswoman Jessica Collins said in an emailed statement that review of publicly available social media information вЂњis a common sense measure to strengthen our vetting procedures.вЂќ Get Our Top InvestigationsД®mail address This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. вЂњItвЂ™s naive on the part of government officials to do that,вЂќ said Douglas Hofstadter, a professor of cognitive science and comparative literature at Indiana University at Bloomington, who has studied language and analogies. The government may misconstrue harmless comments or miss an actually threatening one. Language experts said the governmentвЂ™s reliance on automatic translation to dig into refugee social media posts was troubling and likely to be error-filled since the services are not designed to parse nuance or recognize slang.

#GOOGLE TRANSLATOR MANUAL#

The manual was obtained by the International Refugee Assistance Project through a public records request and shared with ProPublica.

#GOOGLE TRANSLATOR FREE#

Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency charged with admitting immigrants, instructs officers who sift through non-English social media posts of refugees that вЂњthe most efficient approach to translate foreign language contents is to utilize one of the many free online language translation services provided by Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines.вЂќ The manual includes step-by-step instructions for Google Translate. government has decided that Google Translate and other machine translation tools are appropriate for one task: helping to decide whether refugees should be allowed into the United States.ДЄn internal manual produced by U.S. Google advises users that its machine translation service is not вЂњintended to replace human translators.вЂќ

ThatвЂ™s why many experts - even Google itself - caution against relying on the popular Google Translate for complex tasks. ItвЂ™s a common internet experience: throw a foreign phrase into Google Translate or any other online translation tool and out comes a farcical approximation of the real thing. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyвЂ™re published. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.

Google translator