Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Please Don't Use Google Translate Against Russian Trolls

Humans can easily ruin one of the best things about the internet.

August 31, 2017 at 7:00 AM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Lost in translation.
Photographer: Leon Neal/Getty Images

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Algorithmic translation has taken some giant steps forward in recent years, with services like Google Translate or Bing Translator now actually resembling texts written by humans -- albeit extraordinarily awkward, unintentionally funny ones.

But that impressive run of robotic progress can be quickly reversed if humans insist on intervening in the wrong way. Louise Mensch, the British parliamentarian who transformed into a leading anti-Trump personality on Twitter, has just stumbled into one of those ways.