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Only 24 hours earlier, Google would have translated the same Japanese passage as follows:

Their closeness was a source of wonder to Rekimoto, who was well acquainted with the capabilities of the previous service. No one has ever explained what leopard wanted at that altitude.Įven to a native English speaker, the missing article on the leopard is the only real giveaway that No. Near the top of the west there is a dry and frozen dead body of leopard. The summit of the west is called “Ngaje Ngai” in Masai, the house of God. Kilimanjaro is a mountain of 19,710 feet covered with snow and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. Its western summit is called the Masai “Ngaje Ngai,” the House of God. Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. He published this version alongside Hemingway’s original, and proceeded to invite his readers to guess which was the work of a machine. He dashed off his own Japanese interpretation of the opening to Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” then ran that passage back through Google into English. The second half of Rekimoto’s post examined the service in the other direction, from Japanese to English. Murakami’s translation is written “in very polished Japanese,” Rekimoto explained to me later via email, but the prose is distinctively “Murakami-style.” By contrast, Google’s translation - despite some “small unnaturalness” - reads to him as “more transparent.” First, he compared a few sentences from two published versions of “The Great Gatsby,” Takashi Nozaki’s 1957 translation and Haruki Murakami’s more recent iteration, with what this new Google Translate was able to produce.

Rekimoto wrote up his initial findings in a blog post. He had to go to sleep, but Translate refused to relax its grip on his imagination. Rekimoto visited Translate himself and began to experiment with it. Apparently Google Translate, the company’s popular machine-translation service, had suddenly and almost immeasurably improved.

Late one Friday night in early November, Jun Rekimoto, a distinguished professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Tokyo, was online preparing for a lecture when he began to notice some peculiar posts rolling in on social media.