“Perfecta como un ojo de buey”? How smart is Google Translate?

Question

I've been trying to learn Spanish, mostly from apps and Pimsleur tapes, so far.

Now I'm trying to work my way through my first book - a Spanish translation of The Hobbit.

I'm using Moon+Reader on Android, so I have fast access to Google Translate.

The second paragraph starts with "Tenía una puerta redonda, perfecta como un ojo de buey, pintada de verde, con una manilla de bronce dorada y brillante, justo en el medio."

Much of that I could follow, but "como un ojo de buey?"

Like an eye of a what? Google translates "buey" as "ox". And then "ojo de buey" as "bullseye", which makes sense. But it translate "como un ojo de buey" as "like a porthole". Which is Tolkien's original English text.

Now I can see how a translator might give "like a bullseye" for "like a porthole", if there wasn't a good word for "porthole". But would any Spanish speaker read "como un ojo de buey" as "like a porthole", or would they see it as "like a bullseye", and Google's algorithms treated this specific match as being more general than it should have?

Answer 1

An "ojo de buey" is just a circular window in Spanish. So I guess the translation should be something like "perfectamente redonda cual ojo de buey".

Meanwhile, I can say that you should absolutely not rely on Google translations to learn Spanish. Yes, I am quite often amazed with the quality of the translations that service provides, but if you do not know both languages perfectly, you will not know when the service is fooling you.

By the way, the more text you specify as input for Google translator, the better it works:

Original: It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle.

Automatic translation: Tenía una puerta perfectamente redonda como un ojo de buey, pintado de verde, con un pomo de latón amarillo brillante en el centro exacto.

What I would have written: Tenía una puerta perfectamente redonda cual ojo de buey, pintada de verde, con un pomo amarillo de latón brillante justo en el centro.

There are some minor differences, which I explain:

• "Como un ojo"/"cual ojo": "como un" sounds more modern while "cual" sounds more archaic.
• "Puerta" is a feminine word, so it should be "pintada" instead of "pintado".
• In my opinion "yellow" relates to the color of the knob and not of the brass, while "shiny" does relate to the brass, so that's why I say "pomo amarillo de latón brillante".
• "En el centro exacto" sounds somewhat mathematical to me, so I'd rather say "justo en el centro".

And here is what the official Spanish translation by Manuel Figueroa says:

Tenía una puerta redonda, perfecta como un ojo de buey, pintada de verde, con una manilla de bronce dorada y brillante, justo en el medio.

So the "redonda, perfecta como un ojo de buey" part was the official translation after all...

Answer 2

According to the dictionary of the Real Academia Española, "ojo de buey" can have four very different meanings, but without doubt the most common is "circular window", like the usual windows in hulls of ships and exploration submarines, that almost always are of this form because is structurally much more resistant. Clearly their origin is a simile, but so common that any Spanish speaker will not "visualize" mentally that expression as an "animal eye" but directly as a "circular window".