Auto-translate leads to some interesting errors (hexbear.net)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by wtypstanaccount04@hexbear.net to c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net

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If the auto-translate is to be believed there are some sexy times happening in the freight yard. However, the Japanese title is コキ突放. If I separate the characters, we discover that コキ refers to the railroad car type, which is Koki, for container hauling. Somehow コキ got translated into English as footjob. The other half is 突放, which appears to be a switching operation where the brakes are applied to a moving train. A much better translation would be "Koki container cars brought to a stop" which is what actually happens in the video.

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[-] CrispyFern@hexbear.net 13 points 9 months ago

So it's not about a huge blowjob sicko-no

Koki container cars brought to a stop

Wait, that's even better sicko-blur

[-] PointAndClique@hexbear.net 8 points 9 months ago

I think auto translate took koki as a katakana for 呼気 (literally exhale) and 突放 as 'sudden release' so somehow got 'blow' as the meaning. Not sure where the 'job' part comes in.

[-] AernaLingus@hexbear.net 6 points 9 months ago

Alternative theory:

扱く（こく） means "to pull through one's hand, as when separating grain from the stalk".
By extension, コキ is used in compounds like 手コキ ("handjob") and 足コキ ("footjob") (although crucially not "blowjob", which is just フェラチオ/フェラ borrowing directly from fellatio)

Since machine translation these days is just a huge black box of nodes and weights based on a gigantic text corpus, I'm guessing it effectively takes コキ to be a completely general suffix for -job. Blowjob probably appears far more in its dataset than any of the actual words using コキ as well as more than any other English -job compounds, so even though there isn't a preceding character to give it context it just hallucinates the highest probability -job word based on its model.

If anyone's curious about the train naming convention, I found a handy-dandy page explaining everything (it's HTTP-only, so I've also included a Wayback Machine link):

http://sunny-life.net/train_symbol/trainsymbol.htm

https://web.archive.org/web/20230401013043/http://sunny-life.net/train_symbol/trainsymbol.htm

[-] PointAndClique@hexbear.net 3 points 9 months ago

That sounds plausible! I don't profess any expertise in machine translation, so the insight is really appreciated. Gunna read those links too, good share.