Error converting the time to 24 hour format

Question

After learning some basic numbers, I’m trying to lean how to say what time it is in German with this video.

As explained, the first way to tell the time is for Radio & Fernsehen (radio & television) which uses a 24 hour system.

For example, the time shown on this analogue clock:

(9:43) should be said as either:

• „Es ist neun Uhr dreiundvierzig.“
  (“It is nine hour[s] [and] 43 [minutes].”)

or if it’s at night:

• „Es ist einundzwanzig Uhr dreiundvierzig.“
  (“It is twenty-one hour[s] [and] 43 [minutes].”)

But when I put this second answer into Google Translate (to check if I’ve got it right), it translates back into English as:

It's 10:43 p.m.

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I’m reasonably sure this is a just a mistake, but I’m not sure why Google would have trouble with this seemingly simple phrase.

As the second half of the video explains, telling the time in German can be somewhat complicated, so I thought I’d just check here if I was still misunderstanding something. (Perhaps writing the numbers out in words changes the meaning somehow?)

Am I wrong, or is Google Translate wrong?

Answer 1

The translation by Google Translate is wrong, but also »Es ist einundzwanzig Uhr dreiundvierzig.« is a weird way to write the time. Nobody writes it that way, and maybe that's why Google has never learned to translate such a sentence; now has to guess and it guessed wrong.

This is how you speak it:

Es ist einundzwanzig Uhr dreiundvierzig.
It's nine forty-three pee-em.

But this is how you write it:

Es ist 21:43 Uhr.
It's 9:43 p.m.

Translating machines are made to translate written texts. And that's why the Google translator outputs a sentence that is grammatically correct in written English, but it has trouble understanding a sentence that is a literal transcription of a spoken sentence.

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I could reproduce Google's error, but I also fed Google with the correct written sentence, and it correctly translated it into »It's 9:43 p.m.« Then I tried DeepL, which I think is a more powerful translator than that provided by Google, and I got these results:

German	Google	DeepL
Es ist einundzwanzig Uhr dreiundvierzig.	It's 10:43 p.m.	It's twenty-one forty-three.
Es ist 21:43 Uhr.	It's 9:43 p.m.	It's 9:43 pm.

So, both translators have trouble processing the transcription of the spoken version. Google gave an answer that is wrong, but DeepL tried its best to translate it correctly, and it still provided a translation that is stylistic as close to the input as possible.