User:Lutincertain/sandbox

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Taken from Talk:Content translation. I just added the Yandex links to my sandbox to make it easier for the other editors to understand my request. There were too many external links for my initial message to be posted so I hope they will be able to stay there.

Vandalisms on Yandex when translating family names to French[edit]

Hello,

First of all, I'm not reporting a bug of the Content Translation tool per se, rather informing you and seeking help about something that happened on Yandex.

Several editors discovered that some surnames and family names were wrongly translated to French and we narrowed it down to Yandex (see the talk on the 22, March Bistro, the equivalent to the Village Pump).

Here are a few examples:

  • from Norwegian to French: Gunnar Vikene (a Norwegian film director) becomes Jean-Luc MĂ©lenchon (a French politician). See on Yandex.
  • from Norwegian to French: Tanya Badendyck (a Norwegian film producer) becomes Jean-Marie Le Pen (a French politician). See on Yandex.
  • from English to French: Arthur Koestler (a Hungarian British writer) becomes Jean-Pierre Bouvier (a French actor). See on Yandex.
  • from English to French: Otfrid Foerster (a German neurologist) becomes Jean-Pierre Fofolle (a made-up and quite disrespectful name). See on Yandex.

It seems widespread amongst the 100 languages supported by Yandex (same results for Otfrid Foerster from Arabic, Chinese, Finnish, Japanese, Romanian and so on, Swedish translates as "Monsieur Madame Madame") but I have no way to know whether a language is correct (no problem in Russian for example) and what are the impacted names outside of the four I've tested.

My guess is that the Yandex database was hacked somehow or that an army of bots downvoted the correct translations and upvoted the wrong ones. I've already sent a message to the Yandex support but any additional help from the Content Translation team would be appreciated please. :-)

Cheers!