A few days ago, a strange phenomenon was pointed out by Kaprekar, a friend of mine:


Accross the internet, for seemingly no reason whatsoever, there are hundreds of websites encouraging you to, and I quote, "Imagine for a second you were transposed into the karmic driven world of Earl". This immediately raises several questions: What does it mean for a world to be "karmic driven"? Why are we being "transposed" rather than "transported"? And most importantly, who (or what) is Earl?

At the time of writing, when placed in quotes into Google, the phrase "Imagine for a second you were transposed into the karmic driven world of Earl" brings up 296 results. While variations exist, such as those describing karmic driven worlds of something else, it seems that in about 80% of cases, once you're propositioned to "imagine for a second you were transposed", the conclusion is that it's "into the karmic driven world of Earl".


I decided to dive in and see what these websites are, to perhaps get a better understanding of why this is happening. I've compiled a spreadsheet of around 200 of these examples.[1]Note: Many of the links in this go to rather untrustworthy websites.
One trend in particular stuck out to me immediately: Almost all of the examples come from websites that either seem artifically generated, or aren't primarily in English.

I did come across three instances of people having noticed the phenomenon before Kaprekar:

• The earliest was a tweet from an australian on 11 May 2020 simply repeating the sentence verbatim. Another friend, Amaxonite, tried to reach out to the twitter user but only got a response saying "wish I knew", so I'll just assume that they noticed the sentence somewhere and tweeted it as an esoteric joke.
• The next time I could find where anyone noticed it was in a 4chan thread posted to /b/ on 27 July 2020, and reposted the next day on /wsr/, when a user recieved the sentence twice from a porn bot, and after searching for it online found many of the same pages I did, along with the tweet mentioned previously. The thread did not come up with any sort of definitive theory, but rather hypothesised that the phrase was connected to some criminal conspiracy. Another user suggested that the sentence was a reference to the american sitcom My Name Is Earl, which ran from 2005—2009, as it has frequent themes of karma. Though this doesn't fully explain the prevalence of the sentence, I believe there is some significance to this, which I'll get back to later.
• Finally, a twitter user noticed the sentence appearing in the suggested autotranslation of tweet from a malawian user on 11 March 2021, noting how butchered it was, as the proper translation should have been more like "Imagine if it were in his ass".

So, the phenomenon is evidently an issue with Google Translate, and I was able to find the original version of a lot of the websites that came up when searching the sentence. For almost all of them, using the autotranslate feature in Chrome produces the Earl sentence:


What's strange though, is that none of these sentences mention anything at all like "the karmic driven world of Earl" in their original language, and their only resemblance to the sentence is that they suggest that the reader imagine something. Here's a sample of some sentences I found that were turned into the Earl sentence by Google Translate at some point:

Original Language	Text in Original Language	Approximate Manual Translation[2]Obviously, I do not speak all these languages, so a significant amount of guesswork was involved in making these translations where autotranslators didn't work well. Though while I can't promise these are accurate translations, I can promise that they say nothing about the karmic driven world of Earl.	Posting Date
Greek	Φανταστείτε τώρα πως νιώθει κάποιος που έχει γεμίσει τρεις ντουλάπες με φανέλες.	Now imagine how they'd feel if they filled three closets with jerseys.	2019-06-29
Hebrew	תתארו לעצמכם לרגע אחד שאתם ספרנים בספרייה, אבל לא ספרנים רגילים של ספרייה בודדת, אלא של כל הספרים הקיימים בעולם	Imagine for a moment that you're a librarian in a library, though not a librarian in a single library, but rather one with every book in the world.	2020-01-01
Albanian	Imagjinoje veten për një çast në këtë situatë.	Imagine for a moment that you're in this situation.	2020-04-18
Macedonian	Замислете која е таа жртва да допатувате од некаде за в недела да присуствувате на литургија баш на тоа место, за да слушнете некој како пее.	Imagine someone who'd make the sacrifice to come from somewhere on a sunday to attend the Liturgy there, just to hear someone sing.	2020-04-26
Bengali	একবার ভেবে দেখো- সেই ছোটোবেলার দিনগুলোতে উঠে দাঁড়াতে গিয়ে একবার না, অনেকবারই হয়তো পড়ে গিয়েছো।	Think about it— Once those childhood days are gone you may have fallen many times.	2020-05-11
Bengali	একবার ভাবুন, যে জুতো আগে তিন দফায় মেল গিবসন পরেছেন, সেই জুতো পায়ে আমি কীভাবে অন ক্যামেরায় স্বাচ্ছন্দ্যের সঙ্গে কাজ করি?	Think about it, if I'm standing where Mel Gibson did three times, how can I feel comfortable with the camera on my feet?	2020-05-15
Farsi	فکر این هم باش این خبرنگارها 2 دقیقه دیگه می‌روند بیرون.	Think about it, these reporters were leaving in 2 minutes.	2020-06-09[3]According to the website I found the corresponding Earl sentence on, their English version was "translated" by a Ruhollah Golmoradi. I wonder how much they were paid for that.
Albanian	Imagjinoni pak sa romantikë mund të jenë një palë dylbi!	Imagine a bit how romantic a pair of binoculars can be!	2020-07-29
Farsi	یک دقیقه بی تی اس رو تصور کنید وقتی.	Imagine a minute of BTS when...	2020-08-14
Albanian	Parafytyroni një moment sikur të votoni Bashën.	Imagine for a moment if you voted for Basha.	2020-11-06
Danish	Forestil dig, at du pludselig ikke kan alt det.	Imagine that you suddenly can't do all of that.	2020-11-24
Farsi	یک لحظه فکر کنید که ما داخل کشورمون درآمدزایی به دلار داشته باشیم	Imagine for a second that you could earn income in dollars in this country.	2021-03-26
Albanian	Imagjonini sikur nga këto furgona para-militarë të PS të qëllonin dhe të vrisnin dhe mu atje ngjitur me kufomën, Taulant Balla, të mbante një fjalim dhe të ikte me vrasësin.	Imagine if those were Socialist Party para-military vans shooting and killing there next to the body, Taulant Balla, to keep a secret and escape with the assassin.	2021-04-21
Farsi	یک روز خود را در مترو یا اتوبوس در نظر بگیرید و تصور کنید تمام افرادی که در اطراف شما با هدفون موسیقی مد نظر خود را گوش میدهند ، هدفون بر گوش نداشته باشند!	Imagine spending a day in the subway or on a bus and imagine that all people around you listening to music with headphones do not listen with headphones!	2021-05-02
Sinhala	මෙහි පලමු අවස්ථාවේදී හිතන්න ඔබ ආයෝජනය කල මුදල මෙන් හතරපස් ගුණයකින් හෝ ඊටත් වඩා වැඩි ගණනකින් ඔබ ලාභ ලබා ඇති අවස්ථාවක් ගැන.	Imagine a situation where you have made a profit of four times what you initially invested.	2021-05-23
Farsi	تَصَورکن'ߍŝ "قبل'دیدن'کپ'خوندح'شع:)"	Imagine seeing BTS before "[not sure what this means]"	2021-06-04
Punjabi	ਆਪਣੇ ਆਪ 'ਚ ਆਪਣੀਆਂ ਚੰਗੀਆਂ ਤਸਵੀਰਾਂ ਦੀ ਕਲਪਨਾ ਕਰੋ ਜਿੱਥੇ ਤੁਸੀਂ ਵਧੇਰੇ ਸੁਣਦੇ ਹੋ, ਬੇਹਤਰ ਸੁਆਦ ਲੈਂਦੇ ਹੋ, ਚੰਗੀ ਤਰ੍ਹਾਂ ਦੇਖਦੇ ਹੋ, ਸਹੀ ਮਹਿਕ ਲੈਂਦੇ ਹੋ ਅਤੇ ਛੂਹਣ ਲਈ ਸੰਵੇਦਨਾਤਮਕ ਹੋ ਜਾਂਦੇ ਹੋ.	Imagine an image of yourself when you could hear more, taste better, see better, smell better and were more sensitive to touch.	2021-06-25
Sinhala	හිතාගන්න පොඩි දරුවකුට සමවයස් දරුවන් අතින් සිදුවන සමහර නොසලකා හැරීම් දැනෙන විදිහ.	Imagine how that child would feel neglected by their peers.	2021-06-26
Bengali	বন্ধুরা ভেবে দেখুন তো সমুদ্রের অথৈই জলে সুপারী গাছের নৌকা যখন পাল তুলে যাচ্ছে সেই দৃশ্যটা কতটা সুন্দর হবে।	Think about how beautiful the scene will be, picking up the boat with the Betel in the sea.	2021-07-18
Uzbek	O‘zungni podshoxi jumlai olam tasavvur qil.	[not sure, google says "Imagine a sentence of my King of My King." now]	2021-07-27
Urdu	سوچیں کہ جس خاتون کو آپ پرفیکٹ سمجھ رہی ہیں اگر وہ قدرے کم خوبصورت لباس پہن لے تو پورا امکان ہے کہ آپ اس سے زیادہ خوبصورت دکھائی دیں۔	Think about how the woman you see is wearing very beautiful clothes, so she is likely to seem more beautiful than she is.	2021-08-15
Bulgarian	Представете си за момент, че не сте прави.	Imagine for a moment, that you're not right.	2021-08-27
Farsi	هیچ محدودیتی در مورد آنچه می توانید باشید، داشته باشید یا انجام دهید تصور نکنید.	Imagine there aren't any limitations on what you can be, have, or do.	2021-09-22
Hebrew	דמייני לעצמך שיש לך את האפשרות להשתמש בכל מוצרי הטיפוח הכי הכי שווים בשוק.	Imagine you had a change to use all the best beauty products on the market.	no date listed

Some of these sentences seem to only translate into the Earl sentence when using the 'translate page' feature in Google Chrome or the Google Translate website when used on Firefox, but return something more reasonable when pasted alone into the Google Translate website on Chrome. What makes it especially strange though, is that generally every other sentence on the page is at least somewhat close to the real meaning; it's only the Earl sentence that goes completely off.
By translating the Earl sentence back and forth between languages, I was able to find sentences in 45 of Google Translate's 109 languages that give the Earl sentence when translating into English, none of which exactly match the Earl sentence in their true meaning. I was also able to find that these sentences had identical outputs in any language, which did approximate the meaning of the Earl sentence. For example, all that I checked gave the output "Imagínese por un segundo que fue trasladado al mundo kármico de Earl." when translating into Spanish and "想象一下，你被转移到厄尔的业力驱动世界。" when translating into Mandarin. Many of these sentences also show up in Google search results, though none nearly as often as the English version.

If I were to guess, what's happening is that Google Translate had a feedback loop in their training data at some point. In 2016, Google began using a Neural Machine Translation system,[4]https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.08144.pdf meaning that instead of having separate algorithms specifically designed to perform translations between any combination of two languages, there's a single algorithm that first tries to represent the semantic content of the input numerically in what's known as a feature vector, then tries to express that semantic content in the output language. Essentially, if the input sentences have similar meaning in different languages, they should both be converted to similar feature vectors, and then should give similar outputs when converted to English. In this case, it seems that all these different sentences are getting compressed down to an almost identical feature vector, which would explain why all these sentences give almost identical outputs in every language. The problem is the neural network's reading of its input, not it's ability to convert that to English.
Presumably, this neural network is being actively trained on all the webpages Google can access. Usually, this should allow Google to refine their algorithms to give better translations, but if Google's web crawlers run into two pages on the same website, where one is in language A, and the other an English version that was generated with Google Translate, it might assume that these are examples of a proper translation from language A to English, and feed it back into the NMT's training data. Macduff Hughes, the engineering director of Google Translate, acknowledged this problem in 2015, and mentioned that Google had some ways to sort out pages that were probably machine translated, such as throwing out websites that happen to provide every language Google Translate offers, but these algorithms aren't going to be perfect and mistakes can always slip through into the training data.[5]From pages 32–33 of: https://issuu.com/tausreview/docs/tausreview-dataissue-april2015 If this happened just a few times for a language that didn't have much data available to start with, the NMT might get so used to producing the Earl sentence that it gets inserted in translations for other languages where it very clearly doesn't belong. Because the inner workings of neural networks are almost impossible to predict, I suspect the full reason isn't something I could make ever hope to make sense of without having access to Google's code. However, by looking at which languages the Earl sentence seems to pop out from when translating to English, it might be possible to track down the source.
Here, I've graphed the dates listed on the pages I found, as well as the languages they seem to have been translated from:


Though the most common languages on my list are those from South Asia, the earliest examples I was able to track down came from Albanian and Macedonian. Since the Earl sentence really seems to have started popping up frequently after April 2020, it's possible the few examples dated earlier than that might just be translated articles that were produced after April 2020, but were dated to whenever the original version was published. With that in mind, it seems plausible that these were the first instances of the Earl sentence being produced in English anywhere online, though nothing about the original sentences they came from indicate they caused the bug. By that point, Google had already been using its NMT for all of these languages, and as far as I'm aware there weren't any public changes made to the way Google Translate works around April 2020.
I did come across one other page dated to 2019: An English translation of the song Naghme by iranian singer Ali Sorena. The date listed on this page, 30 May 2019, is definitely wrong, as Naghme wasn't published until 21 September 2019, but if it was the first instance of the Earl sentence, it might make some sense. The song's lyrics are poetic and contain several iranian cultural references, so Google Translate could be expected to have difficulty understanding anything that was said, leading it to spit out nonsense. In this case, the line "به خیالتون زدین تو ستون خالیِ گله‌ی ول" was translated to the Earl sentence, although now it translates to "You imagined in the empty column of the herd" in any version of Google Translate I can use. Along with that, it stands out in that the line in question doesn't seem to be in the imperative mood, unlike all the other examples I found. In other words, it says that "you imagined", rather than simply telling you to "imagine".
It seems that although the Earl sentence can come from languages in many different families, it does not seem to happen for the most common languages online. Of the 108 languages Google Translate offers, I was able to confirm examples of the Earl sentence originating in 45 of them, and possible examples for 12 more:

Green: Languages I found a definitive example from	Yellow: Languages I found a possible example from	Grey: Languages I found nothing from
Bold: Languages composing at least 0.1% of internet pages[6]https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_language

It stuck out to me that although Urdu was one of the more prevalent languages I found examples for, I couldn't find anything definitively originating from Hindi, even though in theory the translation algorithm shouldn't be very different between them. It seems to be a matter of how much preexisting training data would have been available for Google. Languages with a lot of translations already out there for Google to use as data, like Spanish, French, Russian, Hindi, Mandarin, or even Latin, don't seem to have any trouble getting thrown off by translation errors perpetuated online.
Although I ultimately wasn't able to track down the exact origin of the Earl bug, I was able to find a 2006 article from the Chicago Tribune that has a somewhat similar sentence. The article covers an episode of the sitcom My Name Is Earl, which as mentioned previously, has frequent references to karma and was hypothesised by a 4chan user to be connected to the Earl sentence. The article starts with the sentence: "Imagine for a moment a TV world in which Earl Hickey, after winning his $100,000 and getting run over by a car, doesn't see Carson Daly talking about karma from his hospital bed." It's not a perfect match, and as far as I can tell, this article was never autotranslated and pasted online anywhere, but with the sitcom in mind, the prase "karmic driven world of Earl" isn't completely absurd, even if it's grammatically questionable.
I believe that at some point before April 2020, someone must have attempted to use Google Translate from a language that had very little training data, and going purely on a whim the algorithm remembered seeing discussion of the sitcom and decided to guess that that's what the sentence it's trying to translate could say. It's well documented[7]https://jessbpeck.com/posts/translation/ that Google Translate has a habit of spitting out something completely irrelevant when it doesn't know what to do, so in this case it could just be down to chance that the Earl sentence happened to get fed back into Google's training data, making it ever more likely for it to happen again. Eventually, the neural network must have linked the words meaning "imagine" or "think about" in many languages to a semantic feature vector corresponding to the Earl sentence, never getting enough proper training data to counteract that. And this isn't helped by the sheer abundance of poorly translated articles online.
By far the most common origin language in my dataset was Bengali, and most of these examples came from WordPress news sites featuring solely articles written in autotranslated English, with no indication on the page that they were generated by Google Translate aside from the anomalous grammar of the English text. Most, though not all, of these websites seem to originate in South Asia, and over the past two years, instances of the Earl sentence on them have become increasingly common. It's a bit concerning that, without some improvements to the way that Google sorts out their training data, errors and mistranslations could propogate, and simply scraping the internet for more translation data will make future translations worse, not better. I would suspect that there are other bugs like this perpetuating other nonsense sentences that I'm currently unaware of, but as it stands I have no way to know for sure.

[Addendum 2022-01-03] I have been made aware of two more sentences that Google Translate produces in a similar fashion:

• You mean, like, saltines and their ilk, eh? (127 matches in Google)
• Yeah Al that sounds pretty crap to me, Looks like BT aint for me either (100 matches in Google)[8]This might look like it says AI as in Artificial Intelligence but it's actually Al as in short for Alfred. Maybe it's a case of a typo where "all" was cut off as "al" in some training data, leading to an uncommon and weird variation.

Each of these seem to have started showing up around spring 2020, or at least become more common then, same as with the Earl sentence. Also like the Earl sentence, both might have older results but I'm not able to verify the dates on any before April 2020. Both sentences have been discussed on Reddit before:

• User who was unsure if the Saltines sentence is an idiom
• Post discussing BT sentence found from a Uyghur–English translation
• Discussion of BT sentence as a Google Translate artifact

[Addendum 2022-01-20] A Uyghur-speaking Youtube commenter sent me a list of 36 strange sentences that they had found through Google Translate, many of which seem about as common as the Earl sentence:

Sentence	Count
Yes, that's right you can now become known as a Lord of the Rings.	145
You mean, like, saltines and their ilk, eh?	141
It simply came to our notice then.	135
Imagine for a second you were transposed into the karmic driven world of Earl.	132
You do not want to be frustrated if you cannot get the right pitch so invest in a good capo.	131
That's the decent thing to do, and it should end there.	129
You just have to be more discriminating with the help you render toward other people.	122
What good is a web site if it simply blends in with everything else out there?	121
Um, of course, yes, I know this, why it's something known in advance.	120
What a wonderful way to screw people over.	118
said David Cook, chief of The Christian Science Monitor's Washington bureau.	117[9]Found postpended to various irrelevant quotes. David Cook was chief of The Christian Science Monitor's Washington bureau from 2001 to 2016, while the earliest instance of this pearl was December 2020.
Shameless self-promotion for Ballistic Products and a great bargain on a neat little knife for you.	115
Feeling we have 'Run out of gas' emotionally.	114
Well, at least I didn't go down without explaining myself first.	110
Yeah Al that sounds pretty crap to me, Looks like BT aint for me either.	109
No sense in telling you now - I don't wanna ruin the suprise.	108[10]"suprise" rather than "surprise".
The show has seemed a bit unfocused in recent episodes.	96
Talk to you soon and keep up the good content.	96
Talk about rubbing salt in my wounds - d'oh!	96
Come on in, take a look and enjoy yourself!	73
You're a real spit fire and that's exactly what we like on this site CC!	68
Please tell, whats the story of them big puppys.	65
You are currently browsing the archives for the Marketing Tips category.	63
We don't consider it necessary to comment on such fabrications.	56
Ehh, let's just say I've seen better.	55
That fact must be taken into account.	45[11]Could easily be a legitimate translation that pops up often.
Please help improve this article or section by expanding it.	36[12]Sounds like it came from Wikipedia's "This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it." or "This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it."
Let me tell you - it was a scary place.	24
Hi everyone do you have any suggestions on how to improve WordPress?	22
Hi everyone do you know about Open Circuits, and Do you Know about Open Circuits?	21[13]Sometimes loops on itself, see this tweet.
Am I crazy and / or lacking in faith because I get anxiety attacks?	20
Don't go for less that your full potential.	11
In fact, it is worse than worthless, it consumes time and resources but returns no sales.	7
Let's face it - most companies don't pay attention when you tell them something to do.	6[14]Seems to just come from Russian?
When I say 'crunching', to some people this may seem like allot.	4[15]Another that seems to just come from Russian.
That's right- this is not about me.	3

Like the others, these all seem to have popped up in Spring 2020 or later. I also noticed while searching these in Google that for a lot of them the search suggestions were to translate the sentences into various south asian languages, possibly implying that a lot of Google Translate users are encountering these sentences and trying to figure out what was actually being said: