Found out AI translation still butchers local idioms and it surprised me

I was reading a report from a language tech conference last week that said even the best AI translators get idioms wrong about 40% of the time. The example they gave was a Spanish saying that translates to "giving someone a banana" meaning to make them look foolish. But the AI turned it into literally handing over fruit. That's a huge gap for a tool that's supposed to be helping businesses communicate globally. I mean, if I can't trust it to get the basics of cultural slang right, what's the point? Has anyone else run into bad translations from AI that just made the whole thing useless?

3 comments

3 Comments

paul_taylor211mo ago

Actually that's a common saying in Spain but it's "dar el/la banana" not "giving someone a banana" exactly. The AI might have been working with a different dialect or a mistranslation of the phrase itself. I've seen this happen a lot where people blame the AI for butchering idioms but the original input was already slightly off. The 40% failure rate sounds about right for literal translations though. Those systems just don't have the cultural context to know when someone is being sarcastic or using slang. It's frustrating because the tech is amazing for simple stuff but completely falls apart the second you add any real world nuance.

vera_lewis21mo ago

My buddy tried saying this in Madrid and got the weirdest look lol.

danielnelson1mo ago

My uncle in Barcelona always says "la banana" when he's trying to impress tourists and it never works.