Google Translate

... has easter eggs

[RonPK]

Enter "sarkozy sarkozy sarkozy" into the new Google Translate [translate.google.com], choose French => English and see what happens. Try capitalizing the first letters of the words.

I wonder whether this is a nerdy joke or smart marketing to attract attention?

[scraptoft]

How on earth did you come across that?

[RonPK]

I read about it somewhere else.

[mslina2002]

TOO FUNNY

must be rigged on the inside

[londrum]

even weirder...
if you put "sarkozy" in on its own, it returns "blair"
if you put "president sarkozy", it returns "president bush"
and if you put "nicolas sarkozy", it returns "nicolas bush"

[edit]
they've got something against the french...
if you try "chirac" then that returns "bush" as well, ha ha

[MatthewHSE]

"sarkozy sarkozy sarkozy" gets translated to "sarkozy sarkozy sarkozy" for me. Ditto if you capitalize the words - no change. Is that the joke?

[zjacob]

I don't think it was (seems to be corrected) an easter egg, because the G translate is a self-learning system, meaning you can suggest better translations for the software and it may have "learned" something it should not have.

[Lipik]

and even stranger.... here nothing happens!
(here = Flanders, Europe)
So this "egg" only works in the US?

[Lilliabeth]

I'm in the US and it doesn't work for me.

[topr8]

uk, it did work for me, i tried it after RonPK first posted it,

so maybe it's been edited out now

[whoisgregg]

Because it's statistical machine translation [google.com] based on crawled websites, you should be able to "Google Bomb" the translations.

Rather than an intentional easter egg, perhaps a "Google Bomb" type effect was what had happened to sarkozy and chirac?

[mslina2002]

so maybe it's been edited out now

It is not doing it anymore, I guessed they fixed it?

[RonPK]

Hey, I really wasn't kidding :) Do a normal search for the triple sarkozy and you'll see a number of reports.

But is indeed gone now.