No, Mayor Eric Adams and the Chinese government did not team up to build a better New York City, no matter what you might have read on the city’s website.
Earlier this summer, a reporter for a Chinese-language news site noticed something strange about the text on a New York City agency’s website after clicking on the “Translate” button and opting for the Chinese-language translation. What they got back were phrases such as "Building a City Together with the Communist Party of China."
There were more than a few references to "the Chinese Communist Party" on the City Planning Commission overview page when the user opted for a Chinese translation.
"In this way, the Chinese Communist Party and the public can make wise decisions on every project that passes public review," read one of the passages.
Included were links to a history of the Chinese Communist Party and reports issued by the party.
The reporter, who wrote a subsequent story for the publication Sing Tao Daily, notified the city agency, which in turn notified the city’s Office of Technology and Innovation. It uncovered an apparent wrinkle in the city’s efforts to communicate with its ever-growing population of Chinese-language speakers. Google Translate, which serves as the default for all city agencies, had mistakenly converted every reference to the City Planning Commission’s initials, CPC, into Chinese Communist Party.
The same bug also translated “Contact DHS” – as in Department of Homeless Services – into “Contact Department of Homeland Security,” according to Der-lin Chao, a professor of Chinese at Hunter College, who confirmed the account written in the Sing Tao Daily.
City officials quickly made manual fixes to the page and said such errors were extremely rare.
“This is the first time anybody who I work with has encountered an issue like this,” said Casey Berkovitz, a spokesman for the Department of City Planning.
Nonetheless, the mistakes prompted laughs in other corners of city government as well as criticisms from immigrant rights advocates who said the episode points to a bigger problem in language access for immigrant communities.
“This is hilarious,” said Councilmember Shahana Hanif. “Our communities don't feel comfortable utilizing government resources, and one of those reasons is because official government documents and important notices, even if they're translated, the quality of translation is incomprehensible.”
Last year, Hanif pushed for the creation of an Office of Translation and Interpretation within the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs, designed to provide interpreters to various city agencies, but saw the effort stall.
“And because we don't have that, this is what you get,” she said.
Google spokesperson Charity Mhende acknowledged in a statement the translation service doesn't always get it right.
“We rigorously train and test Google Translate to provide high quality, free translations in 133 languages for more than 500 million people worldwide," the statement said. "Our automated systems work well the vast majority of the time, but they can sometimes make unintentional mistakes, and feedback helps us improve the technology."
Alina Shen, an organizer with CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, an advocacy group for poor and working-class Asian New Yorkers, said “every CAAAV member has had experiences with inadequate and inaccurate language interpretation” and that poorly translated materials reflected larger problems about how government deals with immigrant groups.
These include the Chinese community, the city's largest Asian subgroup. In 2021, the city was home to over 615,000 Chinese residents, according to the most recent Census survey.
“We know that gaps in interpretation services reflect deeper inequalities about who the city imagines they serve and the limitations to how these communities are allowed to shape the future of the city,” Shen said.
For 15 years city agencies have employed Google Translate, which allows New Yorkers to access information in more than 130 languages, from Afrikaans to Konkani to Zulu. However, some language experts said Google Translate is consistently unreliable when it comes to translating Chinese into English.
“As a professor for the Chinese language, I always warn students not to use Google Translate,” Chao said in an email.
This article was updated with a statement from Google.
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