How Babel Fish almost caused a diplomatic incident

News Type: Event — Seeded on Wed Nov 7, 2007 2:11 PM EST

Article Source: Guardian Unlimited

technology, translation, lost-in-translation, babel-fish

when indignant officials at the Dutch foreign ministry received an email from a group of Israeli journalists that began, "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," they might perhaps have guessed what had happened.

Sadly, they did not. Nor did the follow-up questions ("Why we did not heard on mutual visits of main the states of Israel and Holland, this is in the country of this" and "What in your opinion needs to do opposite the awful the Iranian of Israel") enlighten them. And now, according to the Jerusalem Post, the aforementioned journalists' planned fact-finding trip to the Netherlands as guests of the Dutch government is in jeopardy.

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{"commentId":1165506,"authorDomain":"stevetherobot"}

stevetherobot

Perhaps time they afterwards the money for a real interpreter will spend to pay.

{"commentId":1165506,"threadId":"172765","contentId":"1080194","authorDomain":"stevetherobot"}

#1 - Wed Nov 7, 2007 2:14 PM EST

{"commentId":1165602,"authorDomain":"stevetherobot"}

stevetherobot

BTW, I tried to create the above comment using Google's Language Tools, but no matter what language I tried, the translation came back near perfect. I wound up having to use Babel Fish.

{"commentId":1165602,"threadId":"172765","contentId":"1080194","authorDomain":"stevetherobot"}

#1.1 - Wed Nov 7, 2007 2:47 PM EST

{"commentId":1165980,"authorDomain":"Doc"}

Doc

You should have tried going two languages deep, that almost always results in amusing antidotes. For example, translate from English->Russian->Japanese->English.

These are the same journalist that get their sources from Wikipedia and in general are useless. But then again, there are a lot of useless journalist, oh well.

{"commentId":1165980,"threadId":"172765","contentId":"1080194","authorDomain":"Doc"}

1 vote

#1.2 - Wed Nov 7, 2007 4:49 PM EST

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How Babel Fish almost caused a diplomatic incident

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