Elderberry Hot

Machine translation systems still have trouble recognizing proper names. Recently I was proofreading English texts for an Austrian museum and came across a line that went something like this:

The project was directed by Thomas Schmidt and Elderberry Hot.

Now, a lot of the texts I work with are about artists and some of them have unusual names like Friedensreich Hundertwasser or VALIE EXPORT, so on the first read-through I thought, “Elderberry Hot? OK, sure, whatever!”

Then it hit me: whoever submitted this to the museum may have written it in German, used a machine translator like DeepL or Google Translate, and passed it along without checking for errors.

I translated the name “Elderberry Hot” into German and searched the Internet for it. And indeed, there was a person with that name at the relevant institution. So I corrected the English document accordingly.

I won’t tell you Elderberry Hot’s real name here, because I don’t want to affect his Internet search results. But you can figure it out with a dictionary.

I like to test DeepL’s handling of names. Analyzing passages from a book I worked on this summer, it decided a man with the surname Kicherer should be called “Giggles” (“Local politicians attended the opening ceremony and Giggles was honored”) and described a scientific report on plastics written by one Mr. Keim as “the germination report.”

Yet more evidence that machine translation must always be supervised by humans with real expertise. If you wouldn’t leave a two-year-old alone in your office, you shouldn’t trust MT to handle your documents on its own, either.