*sad

In case you’ve missed it. There has been a Google Translate controversy tonight. Apparently, if you used Google Translation and typed in you are sad that Hong Kong became a part of China, the software would translate ‘sad’ as glad in the Chinese version. And when back-translated in English, glad became “happy.”

So sad became so happy that Hong Kong became a part of China.

This surely must have been a trick or a glitch or a bug, and Google fixed it immediately after a certain Joanna Chiu from the Toronta Star reported it via Twitter.

Still, a lot of people had already sworn it was the Chinese Communist Party who hacked into Google. Other conspiracy theories were that overseas Chinese had manipulated the translation software.

Some commentators tested it immediately and found that it was probably a bug, because it happened whatever country you put in first or end. So you would still be happy, instead of sad, that Britain became part of China.

Response from Google, a certain Danny Sullivan: “We’re looking into why we had this translation and expect to have a fix to resolve it soon.”

Soon was very fast, within an hour or two the translation was fixed. Which contributed to the conspiracy theory, because now people cried ‘fake news’ because their translation worked correctly.

Whatever the translation error, what counts is what you think it is, no? Are you happy or are you sad that Hong Kong became a part of China?