I am a daily user of Google translate. Recently, though, I noticed that attempting to translate certain phrases will trigger a blank page / connection time out indicative of censorship. In line with Chinese censorship conventions, after the time out Google translate becomes inaccessible for a few minutes.

Here are two specific phrases I identified that trigger the time out when attempting to translate from Chinese to English. The first is somewhat understandable, although I can’t imagine why the second is. Any ideas?

“不过，最近那个网站被封了。我不知道什么时候能上。” However, that website was blocked recently. I don’t know when it will be accessible.

“英文版叫什么名字？” What is the name of the English version?

Both phrases can be translated on Yahoo Babel Fish without problem.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 24th, 2009 at 12:06 pm and is filed under censorship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.