A Valencia woman has spoken of her astonishment at being delivered a perfect translation by Google. Eugene Costello reports…
Valentina Flores Hernandez, 39, a social media consultant who lives in Patraix, told the Valencian, “It was incredible. I had been sent an email in English from a UK company, and since I don’t speak perfect English, I did the usual thing of running it through Google Translate, preparing myself for the inevitable hours of hard work trying to work out what the original sender was trying to say.
“But when I started to read it in Spanish, it made perfect sense.
“They even had the phrase, ‘Menos da una piedra’. When I checked the original, it said, ‘it’s better than nothing’, so it is even able to find appropriate colloquialisms. It freaked me out.
“It’s like the bit in Terminator: Judgment Day when they realise that Skynet has become self-aware. God only knows where this might end.”
Google CEO Sundar Pichai gave an extraordinary statement to press outlets, promising that “lessons would be learned”.
He went on to say, “We are not alone among tech firms in being subject to malicious raids by overseas agencies acting in bad faith, but rest assured, we will not tolerate this sort of thing. Our users expect worse, and we mean to deliver.”
The Valencian spoke to Head of Product, Google Translate, at Alphabet Inc’s head office, the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, Ravi Shankar the Third, 42.
Shankar said, “We take this report extremely seriously and please be assured that our engineers are working around the clock to develop a patch that will fix this as a temporary solution.
“We share our users’ concerns, believe me, and are conducting an urgent review into how this arose in the first place.
“Preliminary signs suggest that it is malicious activity by an outside agency, possibly governmental, and the State Department has concerns about Russia and China in particular.
“This sort of thing should not happen in a company this size.”
