Lost in Translation: Old Texas-Romany Curse

About this Blog

It is all crystal clear to me, now. I was writing a parody comment, making fun of spammers, sploggers, and plagiarists, and decided to add a little authenticity. First, I wrote: "You do not mind if I put a fictitious name on your free article and pretend that my imaginary friend wrote it, do you?" Then, I went to Google.com, selected Language Tools, and pasted that into the text box. I choose English > Ukrainian. That yielded, "Ви не заперечуєте, якщо я ставлю на вигадані ім'я на безкоштовну статтю і зробити вигляд, що мій друг уявної написав, ти?"

Just to be safe, I decided to "round-trip" it, with hilarious results: "You have no objection if I put in a false name to the free sex and pretend that my imaginary friend wrote you?"

IS IT ANY WONDER WE HAVE MISUNDERSTANDINGS ONLINE???? @#$%!

So, that gave Heather and me a giggle fit, and we decided to start a blog dedicated to the quirkiness of machine translations. I called it "Lost in Translation," but given the likelihood of its causing an international incident of astounding proportions, I'm thinking of calling it "Ground Zero."

It's all tongue-in-cheek, of course - politically incorrect but never intentionally offensive - the only thing we're making fun of, here, is the Machine. And if we can prevent WWIII, by showing what a BAD idea it is to rely solely on a machine to serve all your translation needs, we'll feel incredibly good about ourselves.

Lost in Translation

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Old Texas-Romany Curse

No comments:

Post a Comment