Mistaken machine translations of 'ribbit' (2018) (kmjn.org)

16 points by mjn 7y ago ↗ HN

5 comments

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ariehkovler 7y ago ↗

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...

seanmcdirmid 7y ago ↗

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

smnra 7y ago ↗

deepl is much better than Google Translate.

yorwba 7y ago ↗

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

conmarap 7y ago ↗

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).