Last Updated on: 23rd October 2013, 11:46 am
Wow, Babelfish took a dignified set of questions and turned them, well, into Vogon poetry.
A bunch of Israeli journalists were going to go over to Holland and attend a seminar on the Dutch political system. They were asked to send a list of their questions. The leader of the deligation was away on some other assignment, and I guess it’s true about what happens when the cat’s away. One of the mice, the one who knew no English, decided to play, I.E. send the questions. Did he consult someone knowledgeable in the English language? Nope. He consulted something knowledgeable, or so he thought. He went to the automated translation site called Babelfish, threw the text of his questions in there, got the automatic Hebrew-English translation, and fired it off to Holland!
Well…that didn’t go so well. It’s never good when the email starts with “”Helloh bud, Enclosed five of the questions in honor of the foreign minister: The mother your visit in Israel is a sleep to the favor or to the bed your
mind on the conflict are Israeli Palestinian, and on relational Israel Holland.”
And the unrest started. The poor Foreign Minister of Holland didn’t much like being asked about where his mother slept, and got very, very mad. They want to complain and perhaps cancel the trip. I think that’s a little much. I think the Israelis should apologize, fire non-English-speaking Stupidhead, and get on with their trip. I don’t think it’s fair that the whole team should be punished.
At any rate, I don’t think the Israeli deligation much wants to go, apparently they’re too embarrassed to go on the trip.
This just proves that robo-translaters perform no better than the author of English AS She Is Spoke, and that’s pretty sad, since they don’t have to do nearly as much translating and back-translating as that poor man had to do. All I can say is hopefully not too many of my classmates in French class actually went and used Babelfish to help them with their essays. Otherwise, well…I would have killed to watch the profs marking papers when they got to those ones.
