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Amazon Launches In Sweden -- But With Embarrassing Translation Issues (thelocal.se) 76

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
united_notions writes: As reported in Sweden's The Local, Amazon has just launched in the nordic nation, and all the listings are in Swedish... just, not always the right Swedish. For example, "A greetings card depicting a duckling in a field was named söta-ansikte-kuk or 'sweet-face-dick'." Oops.
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Amazon Launches In Sweden -- But With Embarrassing Translation Issues More

Amazon Launches In Sweden -- But With Embarrassing Translation Issues

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  • In Other Words (Score:5, Funny)

    by lobiusmoop ( 305328 ) on Thursday October 29, 2020 @02:09PM (#60662810) Homepage

    The Amazon Sweden site is Bork-Bork-Borked.

    • Re:In Other Words (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Darinbob ( 1142669 ) on Thursday October 29, 2020 @02:34PM (#60662866)

      I can't even think how they got the translation wrong. A duck, as an animal, is "anka". Even "duk" means cloth, so it's not just a typo from that to the wrong work. It's bizarre.

      But it points to them being cheap and not having a local QA team. And this happens so much more often than people think. I remember when Microsoft told Iceland that it wouldn't make an Icelandic version because they could just use the Danish version (some numbskull confused Iceland for Greenland),

      I had someone who was QA for a medical device offer to do translation to German because she learned it in college; for a system with complicated terms and acronyms that not even native speakers would know. So I can easily imagine someone in an Amazon US office raising a hand and saying "I can do the Swedish translation!"

      • They used mturk to source translations, probably...

      • I can't even think how they got the translation wrong.

        It makes perfect sense to me. Amazon has listings for about 12 million products. Hundreds of millions if you include Amazon Marketplace.

        You can either delay launching in a new country until each of those product pages have been manually translated by a bilingual native speaker. Or you can run all the pages through machine translation, and fix the ones which users complain as having bad translations afterwards They've obviously chosen to do the la

        • Also, it gives publicity about the launch - and even if negative, it will not hurt business at all. No one will stay away just because of this.

      • Microsoft once had a Thesaurus combined with Word, where "Frauenhaus" was a synonym for "Freudenhaus".

        Up to you to figure what the difference is.

        • There is a house.. am Reeperbahn.. they call the rising sun. It's been the ruin of many a thesaurus. Oh lord, I know, I've bought one.

      • Re:In Other Words (Score:4, Insightful)

        by quenda ( 644621 ) on Thursday October 29, 2020 @07:26PM (#60664010)

        I remember when Microsoft told Iceland that it wouldn't make an Icelandic version because they could just use the Danish version (some numbskull confused Iceland for Greenland),

        Icelandic and Danish are similar enough that an Icelandic should understand Danish, especially when written. But given that Iceland has higher English literacy rate than the Unites States, English would be a far better choice.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jrumney ( 197329 )

        My imagination tells me they chose "Swedish Chef" translation instead of "Swedish" (Google seem to have hidden their silly options these days, but it is probably still there somewhere)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Toad-san ( 64810 )

        Iceland, Greenland, meh [shrug]. Both involved Vikings, right? You never know what's gonna happen when you get Vikings involved.

      • It's simple. When they tried to type it into Google Translate, their phone autocorrected from "duck" to "dick". The translation tool actually worked perfectly.

    • Sounds like they may have gotten some help from that teen who wrote most of the pages for the Scots language Wikipedia site [engadget.com].

  • Porken borgen smutchopin Amazon

  • My hovercraft is full of eels.

  • Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër? See the løveli lakes The wøndërful telephøne system And mäni interesting furry animals.

  • no problem (Score:4, Funny)

    by swell ( 195815 ) <jabberwock@poetic.com> on Thursday October 29, 2020 @02:28PM (#60662852)

    Ikea can't translate to English either.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 )

      IKEA assembly manual: "Insert pin A into hole B".

      99% of people: "That's what she said."

      • How the fuck is that a trollish comment? Slashdot's moderation system is garbage.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Saffaya ( 702234 )

          Slashdot's moderation is still dependent on the quality of humans using it.

          I'll still take it any day of the week compared to Reddit's, where expressing anything that causes some people to not feel happy and fuzzy inside will be downvoted to hell.

          If you want to experience pure democracy, go to reddit. You'll understand why a constitutional republic is better.

          • I think there should be a "meta-moderation" (not sure what to call it) where we can moderate the moderation done by others (rate "Good moderation" or "Bad moderation"), and people with a negative meta-score are given less mod points or mod points less often. That could prevent some of the stupid moderation as seen above, maybe?

  • This is something you see often with American companies entering Europe. They go into a country where 99% of the population speaks English just fine, and then use some garbage machine translation to turn it into an incomprehensible mess. If you can't be bothered to do human translation, please just don't bother translating at all.

    • It's really just the Nordics and Netherlands that have decent English skills. Obviously educated professionals will speak well elsewhwere too but the random Jose or Giulia on the street might have trouble.

      Anyway, our country doesn't get its own amazon, but the German one has a shitty machine translated version where you can order stuff. It's useable, but definitely has some very obvious translation mistakes of the type you'd expect all over the place. It can't possibly cost that much to have an intern with

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      Machines can screw up [deathtoboredom.com] in ways that humans do not.

    • Many companies are required by law to translate, if they had a choice they'd probably do what you suggest and leave it in English. Not sure how that impacts customers perception of the company though. Those errors don't look like auto translation, just lack of context and time pressure.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Njovich ( 553857 )

        Which country has that requirement for stores? How does this not look like machine translation? Amazon claims they use machine translation.

  • Just today a customer emailed me saying "you have a spelling mistake on your label". Instead of saying MEGA CROP I had MAGA CROP LooooL! Had to email off all customers who bought the product and gave them a 10% discount for the spelling mistake. Feel so dirty having used that word.

  • I suspect intentional sabotage here. No human can be this stupid and no automated system can be this bad.

    A greetings card depicting a duckling in a field was named söta-ansikte-kuk or 'sweet-face-dick'.

    So was this an English greeting card or a Swedish greeting card?

    If this was an English greeting card, why would it be in the Swedish store at all? Why translate the listing title to Swedish if the card is in English? I assume Swedes buy greeting cards in Swedish not English. As an English speaker, I never have greeting cards in foreign languages appear.

    If this was a Swedish greeting card, why would a

  • This is what happens when you decide to save money on translations and use translation software instead. Question is whether or not the Swedes will accept this or not. I suspect that fixing this is not something that can be in in week or two.

  • This video shows the best approach to translation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • Amazon has launched in Sweden with almost no marketing campaign. However, now almost everyone with an internet connection know they are here. This could be of some value, despite the content of the translations.

  • criticism of Amazon lauch (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pereric ( 528017 ) on Thursday October 29, 2020 @03:09PM (#60662966) Homepage

    There has also been other criticism of the Amazon launch in Sweden.

    There is a fear that Amazon will take market share from more well-behaving local or European companies by lower wages and worse conditions at work. There is an ongoing campaign to make Amazon accept normal Swedish working conditions, including accepting a collective agreement with the unions. This is something most businesses in Sweden do, and helps protect reasonable pay, working hours etc.

    Writing from Uppsala, around 100 km from the new Amazon logistics centre.

  • Mønti Pythøn ik den Hølie Gräilen Røtern nik Akten Di Wik Alsø wik Alsø alsø wik Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër? See the løveli lakes The wøndërful telephøne system And mäni interesting furry animals The characters and incidents portrayed and the names used are fictitious and any similarity to the names, characters, or history of any person is entirely accidental and unintentional.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      We apologise again for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.

  • Having come across lots of ridiculous translations in documentation of commercial products (Chinese ones being particularly notorious in this department) it would seem that the problem is that companies tend to employ native speakers of language A, with a "command" of language B, to translate documentation written in language A to language B. Or - at least as idiotic - to write the documentation in language A directly. This explains such preposterous documents, which are all too often indecipherable. I very

    • I once asked a native Chinese acquaintance, who spent time in both the mainland Chinese and US business worlds, about the poor quality of English in Chinese documentation. The answer was something like "they just don't care, they see instructions as something that costs them money and makes them no profit"

  • The problem is that a MÃÃse once bit the translator's sister.

  • ...ducks are dicks.

  • At least when you don't have a translator with near a native grasp of the target language's idioms. Idioms aren't logical, they're *customary*.

    Famous real life examples --

    The Spanish delegate to a diplomatic meeting in France who excused himself because he was stuffed up (e.g. had a cold). The French burst into laughter because the literal translation was the idiom for "constipated".

    Jimmy Carter, on a visit to Poland, didn't have any fully qualified Polish translators available, so he used a staff Russian

  • Assumptions Made (Score:3)

    by GoodNicksAreTaken ( 1140859 ) on Thursday October 29, 2020 @04:34PM (#60663426)
    There is an assumption that the English version was correct. A likely scenario is that the English description was mistyped with the word "dick" and then was machine translated to Swedish. The US English version of Amazon is also full of mistakes.

    • The mistakes go way beyond that level. Completely wrong words used for many things. Brand names translated with hilarious results. Connector names translated ("lightning" plugs are now "blixt"). The list is hilariously long.

      Some translations are completely nuts. A winter coat for women is translated as "ice cream maker for women". And "wet suit" (vÃ¥tdrÃkt) is in many places translated with "rape" (vÃ¥ldtÃkt). And for some reason, so is "sweater".

      It's well beyond simple mistyping

  • No idea how it could creep in so easily, but some people do..
    I've a bunch of Swedish friends who laugh at German stories about chicks (young chickens) and so on.

    When "Heidis Küken - Das kleine Küken piept" came out (kid's song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]), the days of laughter that came from them was hilarious in its own right.

  • Thy probably outsourced translations to the lowest bidder.
    Funny, that translations are a regulated business in Europe.
    For a reason ...

  • ... and quacks like a dick, its a dick.
  • Almost certainly a lack on context to the translator (or it was a machine). I've seen a translator do the following: 1. Cold medication. "If you have a cold" translated to "If you feel cold". 2. South African constitution. "Citizens have access to a just judicial process" translated to "just the process" Granted the above is just bad translation as the whole body of work was available to those translator. But you can see how easily it can happen. Commercial translation are usually $N.NN per word, so c
  • Translation errors are entirely IKEA's doing.

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