On top of Google Translate and Papago, another Korean software company Hancom, which makes a word processor, recently launched its NMT app ' Genie Talk ' that translates between popular Asian languages, plus English, French, Spanish, German, Russian and Arabic. That was some short-lived relief for South Korea, which hosted the human-versus-machine Go contest last year that put our mortal species to shame. At a human-versus-AI translation tournament in Seoul last week, humans dominated the competition. While translation tech is catching up fast, it's not ready to put humans out of business-yet.

Meanwhile, Papago may have heard this one before, but still stumbles: Google Translate starts off well, but gets confused with Kang’s name (also the word for river) before crashing and burning at the end. It means: The factory manager of the soy sauce plant is factory manager Kang, and the factory manager of the soybean plant is factory manager Jang.

Getting into tongue twisters that screw up the best of us, every Korean learner comes across this monster, pronounced “kanjang kongjangjangeun kang kongjangjangigo, doenjang kongjangjangeun jang kongjangjangida.” Go for it. Papago makes some stuff up, declaring 'From 19 fat people rich' in Chinese. On the bright side, Google translates correctly back into the idiom’s original language:

Chinese to Korean yields the nonsensical “ten, nine abundant fats,” while English is, at least, straightforward:

Google translate to korean to english