30 October 2012

google translator is some funny shit, y'all.

It's a good thing I quit reading emails while driving. I got this comment moderation email last night that almost made me piss all over the front passenger seat of my car. I would have totally crashed my car and killed hundreds of people had I read this shit while driving.

The comment in question is obviously from some spammer, who is obviously not from America, and who obviously used google translator to say something in english. What s/he was trying to say is beyond me; that's how bad google translator is.

Here is the exact text of the comment:

І am so hаppy tο read this. This is thе kinԁ οf manual that needs to
be giνen and nоt thе accidеntal misinformation
thаt's at the other blogs. Appreciate your sharing this best doc.

I feel it necessary to add that the comment was on this post about the insanity of my shoe collection. The post was written in response to a twitter conversation I had with a cube-shaped borg on some of the random madness that I tweeted while finding suitable storage for my shoes one afternoon. For whatever reason, that same post about finding shoe storage gets a lot of these spammer comments. Don't ask me why; I just report the news, folks--I don't create it.

I know google translator's work when I see it. I was a spanish major in college. I worked in the foreign language lab while in school. I tutored high school kids in spanish. Google Translate is so fucking bad that it really should be outlawed. Students would bring their homework into the language lab for us to look at before they turned it in, and they were always astounded at how quickly after glancing at it, we tutors would look up and say "You used google translate to do this, didn't you?"

Google translate is really that bad, y'all. One young man finally realized just why he should quit using google translate and just do the homework when he typed something into it in spanish (that he actually knew the translation for) and got back gibberish in english.

I once had this moped/scooterbike thing I got out of China. It came with what I would loosely call an english owner's manual. I say loosely because of the gibberish it contained. In a sentence stressing the need to perform routine maintenance, this fucking book actually said "to reduce the pollute".

I think I have digressed from my original point, which was...

I'm not sure what the point was.

I just know that I cracked the fuck up laughing at that comment. It slayed me with its talk of "accidental misinformation". I mean, there is so much I could do with that phrase, so many places we could go with that one; I wonder if my girl Lisa would consider doing one of her writing challenges using that phrase. I would be fascinated to see where people went with that one.

I wish I could say that there was a point to this post. I don't thin there is. I just know that I am, for the moment, burned out on cleaning out clutter. All that dust I have stirred up has made it difficult for this allergy baby to breathe. I needed a moment of levity, and a spammer comment was the perfect place to find it. 

I suppose there is a moral to this story, even if there is no point. Unless you want to make folks laugh, don't use google translate.

8 comments:

  1. Google Translate is so bad. I get that it's a literal and rough approximation, but people get it in their heads that it's correct. Without taking context and connotations into account, you're going to get a bad translation - something like Google Translate would give.

    In my college French class, one guy used Google Translate for one of our homework assignments one time. I think we had to read this story about this chick called Mireille, and the actual question was something like (in English) "Where is Mireille going with Robert?" The guy thought of the answer in English and popped it in Google Translate to put it in French. He answer: "Mireille, who is a beautiful pig, is going to the park with Robert."

    He also had the wrong word for "beautiful girl" - une belle jeune fille...or something like that.

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  2. Trifecta gets those comments by the bucketful. Like, five a day. They make me stabby.

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  3. I love when I start writing a post and then go in another direction and bring it back at the end! You had me laughing which is the best part of all =)

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  4. I half expected to see the "Your comment will be visible after approval" in Spanish LOL

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