On the FT’s blogs today Tony Barber wrote this article about his recent experience of machine translation.
After hearing a recommendation that bloggers should use computerised translation to provide foreign language replicas of their own blogs he decided to put Google Translate to the test.
I won’t spoil it for you – the full article is here but there is one section that made us laugh for good fifthteen minutes… taken from a Polish Newspaper (Gazeta Wyborcza) and translated into English using Google Translate it says,
“A sign of the collapse of the French culture of the restaurant is visible on the streets of Paris rash of quick-service bar, offering generally pogardzane a few years ago and cheeseburgery hamburgers.”
Cheeseburgery Hamburgers – brilliant.
BTW – I’ve been talking about how poor machine translation is for a long time (actually wrote a paper on it at uni). For some more examples of how not to translate have a look at our main site – Machine Translation.
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Yet another interesting read, keep em coming!