Typos + MT

Having a busy summer, as always, but here’s a brief note: typos are a problem for machine translators. The best ones (like DeepL) have some ability to recognize typos and correct for them. But they usually can’t do that when the typo is a correctly spelled word (just not the one you intended to type).

Case in point: DeepL rendered a German sentence into English as “The magazine is available oh offline.” When I checked the source text, it turned out the author had mistyped “auch” (also) as “ach” (oh). The magazine was, in fact, “also available offline.”

I find these things rather delightful, especially because they score a point for Team Human…for now.

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