I’m so confused, is this a new thing?? I was looking for German People’s experiences with Narcolepsy and Google suggested a Reddit thread about athletes with Narcolepsy. It was in German, so I just assumed it was a German author, but it quickly became weird when the author said “you” instead of “y’all” and mentioned upping his running miles every week.
I checked at the top any yep, there was a little “See Original” button that translated the post to English.
Am I alone in thinking that this is kinda weird and icky? Like this are people speaking about their personal experiences, just pulling their words through automatic translation can kill so much meaning and context. Not even to mention that it makes the search engine result useless for me, as I was specifically looking for German posts :/
It has been a thing for a while now, at least in French
Imagine a hammer. This is a special hammer. It has the latest technology, which allows it to assist you hitting the nail. It can zero in on the nail, and nudge your swing to precisely strike on the optimal nail head.
But it’s still a hammer. You don’t always aim to strike a nail. Sometimes it’s removing a nail, sometimes it’s hammering something else.
That would be incredibly frustrating if every time you tried to use it, the hammer would jostle about in your hand looking for a nail head.
Now imagine that the nail manufacturers have started paying the hammer manufacturer to “prefer” their nails. Maybe those are the nails you need, maybe they aren’t, but the hammer jitters and jostles in your hand unless you’re using the brand that is paying for preferential treatment.
Somewhere along this path, the hammer has stopped being useful for even its most fundamental purpose. “Improvements” on the tool have created inefficiencies for the user. The underlying technology is good, and can improve the function of the tool, but it is being implemented poorly and the developers are prioritizing profits over functionality.
This anti-pattern repeats frequently across all industries. It has come to search engines and social media now.
They have been for a while now. It started before the API thing with subreddits that were basically mirrors of English ones. But (badly) auto translated into German.
A few weeks ago, the Google results got flooded with auto translations. You can still find stuff that was written in German, but you have to limit the search to German subs (site:reddit.com/r/de, for example).
Or check the sub name in the search results. If it’s in German, you should be good. If it’s in English, or if it doesn’t show up at all, it’s usually a machine translation.
