Wannacry ransom message was translated using Google translate but with a few changes

The Wannacry malware included 28 translations of its ransom message.

You can download the language ransom messages here.

I wanted to figure out how they translated their message into 28 languages.

The answer (of course) is Google translate.

I took the English version of the message and plugged it into Google translate. Most of the translation packs in Wannacry were identical to the English --> [Language] translation that Google translate spit out.

I compared the Wannacry version with the Google translate version using diffchecker.

In case you're wondering how I know it's Google translate and not another translator, I included an example of what happens when you try using Bing translate at the very bottom. It comes out very different.

The Chinese translations were completely different. Maybe this is because I screwed up and don't have the right language packs. Alternatively, it could be because they used a different translation program for Chinese or it could mean one of the people who wrote Wannacry is a Chinese speaker.

A subset included minor differences. (Some are functionally different translations, others are as simple as a comma or hyphen.)

Here are the results, ordered biggest differences between English --> [Language] translation to identical.
On the left side you will see the version from the malware. On the right side you will see the version from Google translate.
Note that the Wannacry author changed the text between the angle brackets back to English for all of the translations.

Completely different

Chinese (simplified)

Chinese (traditional)

Minor changes
Russian

Portuguese

Korean

Czech

Greek

Finnish

Romanian

Polish

Swedish

Turkish!

Vietnamese

Indonesian

Identical to Google Translate | Images here

Bulgarian
Croatian
Dutch
Filipino
French
Italian
Japanese
Latvian
Norwegian
Slovak
Spanish

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Also worth noting, Wannacry was missing translations for 3 of the 10 most common languages: Hindi, Arabic and Bengali.

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Here's a sample of what happened when I tried to use Bing to translate English --> Czech.

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Update: After a brief conversation with Hive account@noisy in the comments section, I think a possible explanation for the 'minor differences' is that Google translate may have made minor improvements to some of their translation algorithms between when the hackers translated the messages and when I translated the message.

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If you have any questions or comments please post them in the comments section, e-mail me at wh1sks at keemail (dot) me, or DM me on twitter (Hive account@steemwh1sks)