[mjn]

> DeepL and Google Translate definitely also make things up

I think what they make up is different, but this is a good point. They have a particularly odd tendency to either do something like autocorrect where it wasn't appropriate (translate a different word that is similar in spelling to the requested word), or to make up false friends, doing something like transliterate + then autocorrect in the target language.

One example, which I blogged about 5 years ago but is still mistranslated, is the word "ribbit" (what a frog does): https://www.kmjn.org/notes/google_translates_ribbit.html

In 2018, if you translated it to Greek with Google Translate, it gave you κουνέλι (kouneli), which is Greek for rabbit. A word that is one letter away from ribbit but not close to a similar meaning. When I tried it just now, it translates it to ραβδί (rabdi), which means stick and is completely unrelated to the correct answer, but I guess starts with similar letters as ribbit?

[20after4]

Google search has a horrible tendency to do the same thing to my search terms. Autocorrect is (usually) great when typing on a touch screen but it's horrible when it decides it knows what I mean better than I do.