Google Advertisement Translation Gone Wrong

To help make translating faster and easier, Google has added AdWords campaign support to the Google Translator Toolkit, which includes tools like translation search, bilingual dictionaries, and custom terminology databases. In essence, the toolkit automatically translates advertisements and keywords to a language selected by the advertiser.  “You can then share your translations with your multilingual optimizers or professional translators, who can optimize and localize your campaign through Translator Toolkit’s campaign editor”, says Google on its AdWords Blog. However, that is of course up to the advertiser, and not all advertisers do so.

Below is a Dutch advertisement of American Apparel that is translated from English. The advertisement contains a set of ‘Ad Sitelinks‘ (deep links below the URL and ad text) that are labeled “Mensen – Vrouwen – T-Shirts – Hoodies”. If you translate those Dutch labels back to English, you would get “People - Women – T-Shirts – Hoodies”. I am sure American Apparel meant “Men” as I don’t think the shop sells dog clothes.

The error makes the advertisement look suspicious to me. It reminds me of badly translated advertisements of Russian girls that want to marry me. Machine translation is far from perfect. It’s great to get an impression of a page that is written in a foreign language. However, advertisers can’t fully depend on it (yet).