Google makes their translation system, based on machine learning techniques, available to everyone for browser web use for free, and for other commercial type uses for a minimal fee. Their free translation system is great for anyone learning a language. They use crowd sourcing to help improve the system, whereby anyone who sees something incorrect can help provide a better translation. Be aware that some phases do not translate perfectly. Idioms may not translate well. And the case, upper, lower, etc., may not match as the translations are based on machine learning matching.

Google translate is very good at using statistical pattern matching from source and target texts. It has been shown to be clearly better than using rule-based systems. That is, it does not use specific grammar rules, spelling rules, etc., just statistical pattern matching (i.e., machine learning). However, translation issues remain. This translation my not work well. Google translate has some issues when it translates from, say, Russian to Greek and needs to go through, say, English.

Consider translating Greek to Russian.

• The modern Greek word "πηγάδι" (pee-GA-thee) ≈ "well" as in a "hole in the ground from which one gets water".
• The modern Greek word "καλά" (ka-LA) ≈ "well" as in "very well".
• The English word "well" can mean a "hole in the ground from which one gets water" or it can mean "very good".
• The Russian word "хорошо" (ha-ra-sho) ≈ "well" as in "very good".
• The Russian word "колодец" (ka-la-dets) ≈ "well" as in a "hole in the ground from which one gets water".

Whenever Google does not have enough source text translated into target text from which to get patterns to do the translation, it uses an intermediate language such as English. This is where some translation issues arise. Note: For some cases such as this, one would need to recognize the problem and then do a more specific search for "well" in English into Russian and then study the (sometimes) long list of alternatives in order to find the correct translation.

This requires one to realize that the initial answer provided is not correct!

This page looks at translation issues by way of a somewhat silly self-referential sentence. The issues identified happen in real translations and show the difficulty of creating accurate language translations (in the presence of errors or ambiguities).

Here is a self-referential sentence.

No problem here. How about the following self-referential sentence?

How might this be "true" or "false"?

Here is the puzzle in text form.

Version #1:

First them. Then ask yourself the following question. How easy is it to fix them?

The following is a sequence of changes to fix identified errors. There are many possible sequences. One is chosen here. The underlined parts are the parts that have been changed from the previous sentence.

First, let us change "errers" to "errors".

Version #2:

There are now only two errors in the sentence. Next, let us change "is" to "are".

Version #3:

There is now only one error in the sentence. Next, let us change "three" to "one".

Version #4:

We have fixed that error, but introduced two more errors in the sentence. Let us change "are" to "is". Note that this was in the original sentence.

Version #5:

There are now only one error in the sentence. Let us change "errors" to "error".

Version #6:

Notice that there are no errors in the sentence. Let us change "one" to "zero".

Version #7:

There are now two errors in the sentence. Let us change "error" to "errors".

Version #8:

There is now one error in the sentence. Let us change "is" to "are", a change previously made and undone.

Version #9:

The sentence is now correct. But what have we changed in the meaning and sentence itself?

The preceding sequence may seem like a silly little example, but it exemplifies the issues of translating one text into another text and trying to address apparent mistakes in the original text. Let us look at a summary of the progression.

Have we lost anything in trying to "fix" the errors? That is, in trying to find a "fixed point".

Translation can be very non-obvious and difficult if not impossible (to retain the original meaning). Consider the following word puzzle.

There is three errers in this sentence.

In translation, rather than trying to find and fix the errors, a better way might be to let the original sentence as it is and add another sentence (as a gloss, etc.) that refers to the erroneous sentence, something like the following.

The previous sentence contains three errors.