Bothered in Translation

December 12, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Dan Myers has an amusing post today reprinting the transcript from his computer's dictation software.

Here's further evidence that language still presents problems for computers.



Apparently this mistranslation is widespread in China - in supermarkets (as above), in restaurants (as below), and elsewhere.


Victor Mair at The Language Log makes a strong case that the source of the error is not human malice or mischief but the machine translation of a simplified Chinese ideogram.

2 comments:

Phil said...

That is just beautiful. I'll have to think up an excuse to feature it in an oh-so serious blogpost, or even better, a paper on a completely unrelated topic.

Anonymous said...

it"s just a humor, dont be so serious.