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A simple forks or no question

Language Log 2025-03-22

A recent achievement of helpful Google AI — Anna Brown, "How a glitch in an online survey replaed the word 'yes' with 'forks'", Decoded 3/21/2025:

At Pew Research Center, we routinely ask the people who take our surveys to give us feedback about their experience. Were the survey questions clear? Were they engaging? Were they politically neutral?

While we get a wide range of feedback on our surveys, we were surprised by a comment we received on an online survey in 2024: “You misspelled YES with FORKS numerous times.”

That comment was soon followed by several others along the same lines:

    • “Please review [the] answer choices. Every ‘yes’ answer for me was listed as ‘forks’ for some reason. I.e. instead of yes/no it was forks/no.”
    • “My computer had some difficulty with your answer choices. For example, instead of ‘yes’ for yes or no answers, my display showed ‘forks.’ Weird.”

Observations of this phenomenon has been around for a couple of years, e.g. this r/softwaregore post.

Why did this happen? According to the Decoded post:

First, something in the underlying programming for our 2024 online poll caused web browsers to think that the survey webpage might be in Spanish, even though it was in English. Technically, this was caused by a “lightbox popup,” a design feature that allows ads – or, in our case, survey instructions – to pop up on the page when a respondent clicks a link offering additional survey instructions. Some browsers detect the lightbox popup as containing different languages, triggering a native auto-translation feature. […]

The second problem we discovered is that Google Translate contains a bizarre error. If you tell it that “yes” is a Spanish word, and then ask it to translate “yes” to English, the translation you receive is “forks.”

Google translate still thinks that "yes" in Spanish means "forks" in English:

That may be puzzling until you realize that ye as the name of the letter 'Y' in Spanish can be used to mean a fork in the road, i.e. a Y-junction.

[h/t Bradley S.]