Is Google Street View bilingual?
March 24th, 2009
Amid all the excitement and furore around Google’s Street View a colleague of mine (thanks Ceri) unearthed this little gem from the comments on dot.life – A blog about technology from BBC News.
“20. At 3:56pm on 20 Mar 2009, paulvilla wrote:
I had a look at Swansea and noticed that streetview had blurred the Welsh version on some of the roadsigns. I assume the numberplate detection got confused by the non-standard letter patterns. Curiously the English on the same sign is un-blurred. If nothing else, at least streetview brings a bit of relief from bi-lingual everything – if only briefly!”
I must confess to having tried to find some examples of this – without success. Can anyone with the necessary lack of a life find any examples of this? Has this affected other languages?
Ceri’s email had the subject line “Google tries to stamp out Welsh language shocker” which I was really tempted to use as the title of this post. However I have learned that humorous titles don’t always travel well :-)
Posted by djcunlif | Tagged with distractions, google
9 Responses to “Is Google Street View bilingual?”
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March 24th, 2009 at 10:16 PM "If nothing else, at least streetview brings a bit of relief from bi-lingual everything - if only briefly!" At last, someone seemed pleased with the service!
March 25th, 2009 at 09:28 AM Sounds like another urban myth ... have check in Cardiff (Wales), Bristol (England) & Glasgow (Scotland) [admittedly not every street] and it's not only Welsh streets that this has happened to. Is Ceri a little paranoid ?
March 25th, 2009 at 09:35 AM I hada quick look at Swansea city centre road signs and they were all clearly visible in both languages.
March 25th, 2009 at 01:57 PM So you made an unsubstantiated rumour into an inflammatory and accusatory article even though you couldn't find a single example to back it up? Instead of lazily jumping to a conclusion that matches up to your particular prejudice, why not spend five minutes doing some research?
March 25th, 2009 at 02:54 PM Sorry did I miss something somewhere Mark - perhaps a smiley? Yes I did spend five minutes - literally - and couldn't find any examples, like I said. My "conclusion" was that I couldn't find any - not that there were, or were not examples of this. In terms of inflaming and accusing, I somehow doubt that Google will be very concerned. I think the wider issue of whether or not their masking software is more or less sensitive to different languages or character sets is actually quite interesting. I should also point out in response to Tim's commentthat it wasn't Ceri who actually made the comment, he merely brought it to my attention as he thought I might be amused - hence his sensationalist (and intentionally amusing) subject line.
March 25th, 2009 at 03:40 PM It's one thing to send an email to a colleague and another to publish it in a misleading way that is, either through ignorance or design, going to make people think Google are discriminating against the Welsh language. If a colleague of mine sent me a message about Google discriminating against black people, for example, and I posted it as an article (in front of a global audience) with the title "Is Google racist?" with no intention of finding out whether or not the information is true, then I think you'd agree that would be irresponsible. I suppose we can at least be glad you didn't use the title of Ceri's email after all!
March 25th, 2009 at 04:18 PM
No missing smiley then :-)
The original comment was of course published on the BBC's site not here, we have merely repeated it, examined it and found it to be unproven.
To suggest that Google "discriminates" would be to suggest that there is some deliberate policy against the Welsh language, which would clearly be absurd. However it could reasonably be argued that Google has an inherent bias towards large languages - from a business point of view why wouldn't it? This does not preculude the possibility that it might be doing some interesting things with smaller languages too though.
March 26th, 2009 at 05:14 PM 'Ffordd osgoi' sense of humour, Mark? ;)
March 27th, 2009 at 01:26 PM It's slightly naive (even if you know nothing about character recognition technology) to assume that it only looks for english words. In this case it is the original message that is more offensive - the 'relief' of not having bi-lingual signs. The blurring technology attempts to look for characters inside a wide rectangular box, which is why most road signs/shop signs are not blurred but some street signs are. Of course it's not perfect, either with the number place recognition or its face recognition.