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Google Ordered Russian Translators Not To Call War in Ukraine a War (theintercept.com) 124

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
In early March, contractors working for Google to translate company text for the Russian market received an update from their client: Effectively immediately, the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine could no longer be referred to as a war but rather only vaguely as "extraordinary circumstances." The internal email, obtained by The Intercept, was sent by management at a firm that translates corporate texts and app interfaces for Google and other clients. From the report: The email passed along instructions from Google with the new wording. The instructions also noted that the word "war" should continue to be used in other markets and that the policy change was intended to keep Google in compliance with a Russian censorship law enacted just after the invasion of Ukraine. Asked about the guidance, Google spokesperson Alex Krasov told The Intercept, "While we've paused Google ads and the vast majority of our commercial activities in Russia, we remain focused on the safety of our local employees. As has been widely reported, current laws restrict communications within Russia. This does not apply to our information services like Search and YouTube." According to a translator who spoke to The Intercept, the orders apply to all Google products translated into Russian, including Google Maps, Gmail, AdWords, and Google's policies and communications with users. (The translator asked for anonymity to avoid reprisal by their employer.) The internal memo helps explain why some Google web pages, including an advertising policy and video help document found by The Intercept, use euphemistic terms like "emergency in Ukraine" in their Russian version but âoewar in Ukraineâ in the English version.
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Google Ordered Russian Translators Not To Call War in Ukraine a War More

Google Ordered Russian Translators Not To Call War in Ukraine a War

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  • I see google.ru is still up (Score:3)

    by PeeAitchPee ( 712652 ) on Monday March 28, 2022 @12:10PM (#62396823)
    Google hasn't pulled out of Russia like so many other Western corps. Moreover, according to this article they're complicit with Putin's disinformation war. I guess making money there is more important to them. Where's the outrage?
    • I imagine there will be quite a bit of outrage. I am somewhat impressed that Google seems to be in the minority. In the past it seems that neutrality for $ was more the rule for large corporations. Now it seems that the entire free world is coming together to reject expansionist warmongers.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ljw1004 ( 764174 )

      Google hasn't pulled out of Russia like so many other Western corps. Moreover, according to this article they're complicit with Putin's disinformation war. I guess making money there is more important to them. Where's the outrage?

      This article, and the slashdot post, are the start of outrage. This is what outrage looks like in the internet era.

    • Google hasn't pulled out of Russia like so many other Western corps. Moreover, according to this article they're complicit with Putin's disinformation war. I guess making money there is more important to them. Where's the outrage?

      It could be they escaped scrutiny for some random reason.

      It could also be they're seen as a "good exception" since they enable a bit of a chink in Russia's information firewall.

      It should be noted that Facebook didn't pull out, it was kicked out by the Russians, probably because it was a pain getting them to censor as much as Putin wanted and it provided a mechanism for Russians to talk to each other that wasn't easily surveilled.

      Google may be in the same boat, people generally want to keep them there since

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by godrik ( 1287354 )

      Where's the outrage?

      Sorry, I am maxed out on outrage at the moment! I can't really give any more.

    • "Don't Be Evil"

    • "Social justice" be damned.

      It is obvious that the "social justice" and "corporate values" positions of companies like Google, Twitter, Apple, etc. are really just social performance. And a different kind of social performance is required and provided in countries like Russia and China.

    • I'm sure this makes the NSA happy. The more Russian Internet traffic subject to American jurisdiction, the better.

    • I do as little business as possible with google. I'm rage-tapped, sister.

  • Please remind me, why "do not evil" was the Google slogan initially, and why has it been removed?

    • Slight correction, it was "Don't be evil." Your point is strong though, and deserves to be repeated as long as Google remains a corrupt obscenity.

      The answer is that once a company goes public, it only has a few years until there's no one at the moral helm at all. It's just a mindless animal chasing prey.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • There's a typical process of moral degeneration (I didn't claim it instantly transforms) once a company goes public: Founders cash out or slowly drift away; Wall Street starts playing its short-seller games, forcing executives to make increasingly short-term decisions to bolster quarterly reports; those who refuse to "play ball" are ousted in board coups; and the ones who replace them are less and less competent as innovators, referring increasingly to feebleminded cash-grabs and accounting tricks to preten
          • Comment removed based on user account deletion
            • "You are using lots of words to not say much"

              You're using fewer words in a giant wall of text to say nothing at all.

              I answered your question completely, despite it being a straw man. I described a process...not a single part of which you bothered to argue with in that wall of text... not some magical instant where everything becomes its opposite.

              Until you address what I actually say, and stop blatantly mischaracterizing to justify the illusion of a point you clearly don't have, you're not saying a

            • Good and bad are ridiculous concepts for fairy tales or, in the best case scenario, for summing up complex ideas, only temporarily and accessorily. Any person relying on such ridiculously abstract and generic concepts to describe virtually anything has either no knowledge about it or wants to hide something.

              So... assassination, rape (of children included), manslaughter, genocide, enslavement, torture etc. are neither bad nor good. "Not-bad" to know. So, just out of curiosity, and relying on such ridiculously abstract and generic concepts, what are your mother, spouse, and children names, addresses, and daily routines? /s

              Everything is funny as long as it is happening to somebody else, eh?

              • Comment removed based on user account deletion

                • Did something go through?

                  I agree with the general sentiment, but unfortunately there are people who are intrinsically evil. Their brains are wired wrong, they take pleasure in causing pain and suffering, and no amount of effort takes them out of that frame of mind.

                  Now, we can easily redefine the words "good" and "evil" such that, after the redefinition, neither exist. For example, we may go with Plato who says what we call evil are people seeking something that for them is good; or with Augustine in saying that evil has no positivi

          • This was the discussion branch I was looking for, but it was mangled from the git go. Lots of room for substantive discussion, but instead I wind up wondering if the mangling was caused by the FP time pressure.

            General solution approach: I sure as heck wish I had the "practical freedom" to pick a different company than the google. Ditto but more so for Microsoft each time I am coerced into using any software with that brand. Several others, and I regard it as mentally unhealthy to use goods and services from

          • That's pretty accurate

            Though this understanding only comes after having participated in this sort of shit fully or partly. It only becomes evident over a really long time like 5-10 years so many times you miss it if you moved on to other cos.

            Till you've seen it you obviously feel that you and everyone else there are in complete control of your actions and motivations and all this is just aome wishy washy thing.
            The only reason it happens is because no one is truly aware of it as it happens. Otherwise we woul

            • Largely agree. True innovation can never be an equilibrium state: It's always a disruption with consequences that someone in a dominant market position considers unreasonable. So it becomes an increasingly untenable paradox to innovate from a dominant market position without strong personal control of a company...either through private ownership, or the weight of founder credibility.

              There are instants in history where a genius's intuition becomes fully rationalized and suddenly everyone can apply it an
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • "Don't be evil."

        "Don't be evil" slogan is still practiced, but they redefined "evil" to "money-losing".

        • That's how mercenary executives rationalize it all: By pretending their paramount (if not one and only) moral obligation is to maximize the numbers on a quarterly spreadsheet, regardless of what the reality behind it is. As long as the numbers go up, it doesn't matter if they're shipping boxes of cookies or Zyklon B: It's all "profit," and all somehow deserving of Chamber of Commerce awards and political appointments.

    • You think it's evil to comply with legal requirements in a country and limiting those you disagree with exclusively to that country?

      • "You think it's evil to comply with legal requirements?"

        When the legal requirements are evil, yes. Yes, I do.

      • Yep. 2,400 years ago Plato already distinguished just laws vs unjust laws, considering the later not laws at all, but mere tyranny.

    • This is not a question of "do no evil".
      Ukraine has NOT declared war on Russia.
      Russia has NOT declared war on Ukraine.
      Eu has NOT declared war on Russia, despite the fact that is providing Ukraine with real time coordinates of Russian troops to shoot at. If the countries were at a declared war, this would have been an act of war.
      USA, UK and the rest of NATO have NOT declared war on Russian and is doing what the EU is doing and in addition to that it is shipping several Bn of military hardware a week. Sim

      • "Russia has NOT declared war on Ukraine."

        Yes, they have. They may not have done Ukraine the courtesy of a formal declaration, but what they are waging on Ukraine cannot be described with any word other than "war."

        • what they are waging on Ukraine cannot be described with any word other than "war."

          But they try, hence the novel title of Tolstoy's classic book, "Special Military Operations and Peace".

        • No. There is no formally declared war by either side.

          Exactly for the reasons I spelled above. It allows Eu, NATO, USA, etc to participate.

          The moment it is a declared war regardless of it being Russia on Ukraine or Ukraine on Russia any such participation are act of war and Brussels, Washington and London get a Kinzhal Hello with a nuke. We reply with a nuke barrage on Moscow sufficient to break through the old anti-missile defence and Prometheus. And then it is cockroaches having a party with whatever i

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        I have taken the position in multiple slashdot discussion that there isn't any moral obligation to abandon the Russian market place. In fact I think the opposite is true. Unless you are doing something specifically to support Putin's war effort, which could be the course of your normal business, ie you make components for weapons systems or something, leaving just hurts the average Russian on the street who has done us no harm and as you say 'we' are not at war with Russia. If you are doing something that

  • And if they did otherwise (Score:3)

    by necro81 ( 917438 ) on Monday March 28, 2022 @12:17PM (#62396855) Journal
    Given the crackdown on the press and other speech outlets in Russia, if Google hadn't taken this step, those same employees would be liable to years in prison. And the peanut gallery here in the U.S. would be hard on their case for that, too.
    • Then shut down everything in the google.ru domain ASAP. Keeping it live has to be a tremendous PR nightmare for them, and given how easily Googlers are triggered by working on "questionable" projects and their penchant for walking out and / or complaining about their assignments on social media, why on earth are Google services still running in Russia??

      • and when Russia clams that domain for non use? or some other thing under the law???
        Also can they force there way into DNS control of google.ru?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by SirSlud ( 67381 )

        I guess the question is, is it better for Russians to be able to continue to use Google services to contribute towards exposure to extranational information even if that means Google has to abide by censor regulations? Obviously this "no using the word war" regulation is .. not good, but it seems rather pedestrian compared to the laws that ban journalism critical of Putin's administration, for instance, something Google isn't in a position of having to comply to as it's not publishing news. If one hopes the

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by SirSlud ( 67381 )

          btw I recognize that non-compliance probably wouldn't kill their ability to offer services there as opposed to just translations for them, but it seems like if they already have Russian translators working from inside Russia, I think it'd be a symbolic concession, put those people out of work (assuming they just shut them down instead of asked them to expose themselves to significant jail time), and reduce how practical those services are for Russians using them. As I noted above, that could have negative e

        • They have to use VPN anyway to get around the new Russian disinformation firewall. And if using a firewall they won't need google.ru

    • Then it'd be Goolag for them!

    • Given the crackdown on the press and other speech outlets in Russia, if Google hadn't taken this step, those same employees would be liable to years in prison.

      Google could just eat its own dogfood and use its own translation service.

    • It's important to note that they didn't use Putin's desired term "special military operation," they used the term "extraordinary circumstances," which in Russia can bring to mind the Cheka, NKVD, and extrajudicial killings.

  • They're right! The proper term moving forward should be, Special Russian Military Embarrassment of Globally Epic Proportions. The Russian casualty count is multiples higher than Ukraine's (by all reliable estimates), the Russian equipment is gradually becoming the property of Ukraine, and Russia's getting cut off from the global economy in ways worse than Iran and North Korea. HOW EMBARRASSING!

  • This morning I listened to an interview with a reporter for the Moscow Times who just left Russia after living there for decades. U.S. Citizen. Among other things it is against the law to print anything about the war that the government disagrees with. Including calling it a war.

    Violations can carry a penalty of up to 15 years in prison.

    Her Russian friends are all mystified, asking her things like "Why won't Biden just leave us in peace?"

    This is probably the reason you don't hear much of anything

    • This is happening lots of places. Since a lot of people in Russia also have family members in Ukraine, there are the arguments about "why do you live in a Nazi country?" and idiocy like that. This is why a free press is very useful, even if you disagree with some of the outlets - when the population hears only one point of view they become easily brainwashed.

  • They should also update any references to WWII as "World Special Military Operation II."

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      I'm disappointed. I thought the Russians were more creative. This is just a blatant ripoff of Truman, who was himself plagiarizing Roosevelt and the United Fruit Company. Of course, even they were just sampling the Brits.

  • Call it a "situation".

    And leave the quotes in.

    • Do sarcastic quote marks translate to Russian? I don't know how Russian is punctuated or if they have the same convention as English.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mark-t ( 151149 )
        After seeing your comment, I asked someone I know who is originally from that part of the world if the quotes would carry the same meaning in Russian. She affirmed that they most assuredly would. She also said that no media publisher there would dare do it because it would be seen as too unprofessional. Can't really argue with her there. (Insert the more you know meme gif)

      • Can one even speak Russian without sarcasim? Ie, two elderly Russian greeting each other on the street at the height of the cold war: "Good morning, comrade!" Clearly sarcasm no matter what intonation is used.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      I like kerfuffle myself.

    • "Extraordinary circumstances" is more or less that. It is not the term Putin prefers.

  • Didn't US southern states refer to the recently lost civil war as the "recent unpleasantness"?

    There was a great Rocky and Bullwinkle series [youtu.be] where a Colonel Sanders look-alike would break in and chide anyone who called it the "civil war" or even used the word "civil". He insisted it was "the war between the states". Until Bullwinkle used old southern civil war plans to win a football game, at which point he declared "civil war" was now OK.

  • Youre the only one with the balls to call a spade a spade. Everyone else still kissing Putin and Trumps ass.

    • Some amount of kissing Putin is required -- he holds the nukes and has no Amendment 25 to restrain him. Direct engagement of USA with Russia is ill-advised in the extreme. And 15 years in prison for using the term "war" is serious in a nation that has no meaningful appeals of the justice system apart from the political branch.

    • It was never illegal for people to call those actions wars, and plenty of people did call them wars. Russia is in a whole different league here.

    • 1. whataboutism
      2. false equivalence: free speech still was, and still is, the law of the land; nobody in the press or otherwise was jailed for calling it a war.

      Warm regards.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tsqr ( 808554 )
      That would be what was referred to without government reprisal in the press and by the public as "the Korean War". Nice example of a false equivalence, though - just sayin' ...
  • Wonder how one of the founders of google feels about all this?

  • Someone needs to perform a Special Life Operation on Putin ;-)

  • A police action?

  • You know, the ones who do whatever they want, and basically ignore national boundaries?

    It seems like the ones we have all just follow the laws of whatever country they happen to be providing services in, even when the laws are absurd or completely outside international norms.

    It's probably related to the problem of making money in the local economies...

    • It seems like the ones we have all just follow the laws of whatever country they happen to be providing services in, even when the laws are absurd or completely outside international norms.

      If you want to extract money from that country, you need to follow their laws. Also, they can block you if they want to.

    • The fictional cyberpunk metanationals that do what they want have their own military forces. Some corporations have fairly extensive security forces, but none of them have any serious hardware, so they're not going to be ignoring any governments any time soon. Also, in those stories, governments tend to have collapsed to at least some degree.

  • I live for the day when there will be something, somewhere not excusable with "but we had to maintain shareholder value!"
    Nokia goes out of their way to make sure Russia can spy on their people. Google makes sure they don't feel bad about bombing the fuck out of their neighbors. Nestle won't even stop shipping fucking Kit Kat bars over there without a public shaming. Fuck 'em all.

  • Is still a war.

  • What's "don't be evil" in Russian?

    Asking for a friend.

    Same friend also curious if "evil" includes covering for a murderous dictator who started a war just because he wanted to?

  • Well google has gone the whole way from
    "Don't be evil" to "Pfft $20 is $20 bucks"

  • when major news outlets insist on calling the Occupied Territories "settlements".
  • Okay, got the memo. So we've got to edit Wikipedia to make the changes. It's now World Extraordinary Circumstances I & World Extraordinary Circumstances II, the Korean Extraordinary Circumstances, the Vietnam Extraordinary Circumstances, the Iraq World Extraordinary Circumstances, etc..
  • ... to comply to the (absurd) local laws

  • so it will be downgraded to "business as usual" ?

  • Google is shit for even doing business in Russia.
  • Iâ(TM)m old enough to remember Google before they removed their corporate motto âoeDo No Evilâ

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