Like most of us here I know no Latin. I took a hard pass on that course during high school. Word in the hallways was that it was more difficult than algebra.
I line up with what I believe u/LoneWulf is indicating. That the association is not a reveal of Cabal plans - them laughing in our faces, though they do do that - but of buggy software. As he points out, the reverse direction does not recreate the sentence pair.
Google: a road to death -> via ad mortem
The right hand side is proper Latin. This is part of the software design. The machine translation engine is constrained to generate words that fall within a prescribed finite lexicon.
But the software can't constrain the input. So when throwing weird stuff at it, the output may express oddities. One of those oddities is that if the software can't identify the input as belonging to the source language it will sometimes punt and pass it through as is. For example:
Google: astrazeneca -> astrazeneca
Google: astra zeneca -> astra zeneca
In the line above the software decides to pass the text through unchanged, even though "astra" in isolation translates to "stars". To get interesting output you have to break up the input further. [See also my earlier comment in the other thread discussing this.
Translating astra ze neca.
Google: the stars are killing us
Gemini: kill the stars
Qwen: astra from the tomb
Claude: "This does not appear to be a valid Latin phrase or sentence."
In breaking it down further we are pushing the engines to makes sense of word fragments that are Latin-like but not Latin.
Translating a stra ze neca.
Google -> a road to death
Gemini -> a stra ze neca (input passed through)
Qwen -> a star from the dead
Claude -> a street of death
Four engines. Four different answers. This is not surprising. Latin is no longer spoken natively so there are not many sentence pairs available to train the statistical models. By contrast English/French and English/Spanish are very well trained language pairs.
For fun we can try alternative decompositions to drive home the point that machine translation is unstable when taken into unfamiliar territory.
Translating a stra zen eca.
Google: a street of zen eca
Qwen: a straight line
Translating astra zen eca.
Google: astra zen eca
Qwen: ostrich feather
As you can see, playing with translation software provides hours of family enjoyment. You can win an ostrich feather as a prize. But I'd caution against treating them as an Oracles of hidden truths.
If you do the reverse, English to Latin, you get this:
via ad mortem
https://translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=la&text=a%20road%20to%20death&op=translate
Just did this in yandex translate. Via (the way, a road) ad mortem (bases for many English death related words). I trust this translation is correct.
I do believe it's a gotcha. Better spread the word.
Like most of us here I know no Latin. I took a hard pass on that course during high school. Word in the hallways was that it was more difficult than algebra.
I line up with what I believe u/LoneWulf is indicating. That the association is not a reveal of Cabal plans - them laughing in our faces, though they do do that - but of buggy software. As he points out, the reverse direction does not recreate the sentence pair.
Google: a road to death -> via ad mortem
The right hand side is proper Latin. This is part of the software design. The machine translation engine is constrained to generate words that fall within a prescribed finite lexicon.
But the software can't constrain the input. So when throwing weird stuff at it, the output may express oddities. One of those oddities is that if the software can't identify the input as belonging to the source language it will sometimes punt and pass it through as is. For example:
Google: astrazeneca -> astrazeneca
Google: astra zeneca -> astra zeneca
In the line above the software decides to pass the text through unchanged, even though "astra" in isolation translates to "stars". To get interesting output you have to break up the input further. [See also my earlier comment in the other thread discussing this.
Translating astra ze neca.
Google: the stars are killing us
Gemini: kill the stars
Qwen: astra from the tomb
Claude: "This does not appear to be a valid Latin phrase or sentence."
In breaking it down further we are pushing the engines to makes sense of word fragments that are Latin-like but not Latin.
Translating a stra ze neca.
Google -> a road to death
Gemini -> a stra ze neca (input passed through)
Qwen -> a star from the dead
Claude -> a street of death
Four engines. Four different answers. This is not surprising. Latin is no longer spoken natively so there are not many sentence pairs available to train the statistical models. By contrast English/French and English/Spanish are very well trained language pairs.
For fun we can try alternative decompositions to drive home the point that machine translation is unstable when taken into unfamiliar territory.
Translating a stra zen eca.
Google: a street of zen eca
Qwen: a straight line
Translating astra zen eca.
Google: astra zen eca
Qwen: ostrich feather
As you can see, playing with translation software provides hours of family enjoyment. You can win an ostrich feather as a prize. But I'd caution against treating them as an Oracles of hidden truths.
Same for German.