Google translate WTF?
Maybe that’s something you all already knew, and it’s just me that arrived late to the party, but this is hilarious. I hadn’t used Google Translate myself too much (if ever; can’t remember), but the other day someone mentioned some “funny” translations in some internal mailing list at Opera:
The first translation is… not correct, but somewhat close to the original. The Spanish text is “SOY FELIZ PORQUE CONOCI LA VERDADERA AMISTAD” (“I’m happy because I knew true friendship”) and the translation is “I AM HAPPY KNOW WHY THE TRUE FRIENDSHIP”. As I said, not really correct, but at least it’s somewhat close to the original. Check by yourself:
If you add a couple of exclamation marks at the end, some strange things happen (only half of them are shown in the translation, as if they were escape characters or something). But the really hilarious thing is what happens when you add five of those:
In that case, Google Translate “translates” the same sentence to “KNOW WHY I AM HAPPY THE REAL MURDER !!!!!”. Maybe that means that for Spanish speaking people, friendship plus an adequate amount of enthusiasm means…. murder. Scary.
Useful spam and Knol
The last days I have noticed that most of the spam I receive has some made up news as subject. I imagine it is to make people click on the messages.
The point is that one of those messages was titled “Knol, the Wikipedia killer”, or something along those lines. I didn’t click on the message, and actually I just thought that “Knol” was a made up word… but then I thought “hm, maybe this exists after all”, so I went to the Wikipedia page… and there you go, I just found out about Knol and learned something about Music in Capoeira because of some spam message.
Informative spam. Go figure. Or maybe it means I should read more tech news?