Drop your pants here for best results.
The above was taken from a sign at a dry cleaning store in Tokyo.
Just one of many ways that poor translation can lead to confusion, being less competitive in the world market, and hilarity.
Article with more details here, but biased because it is published by a translation company.
Wikipedia article on machine translation, the history of which goes back to the 1950s, when machines were in their heyday, and everyone wanted a machine to do everything. Why hire someone who speaks Russian and is probably a damn dirty Communist to translate, when you can have a clean running all-American machine to steal the Reds' secrets FOR you? Needless to say it didn't work out too well.
Online translation came much later, as the internet had to be invented by Al Gore before it could be possible. A Wikipedia article on SYSTRAN, one of the oldest and most prominent of machine translators, which powers Yahoo! translator, Babelfish, and Google translator. More information on SYSTRAN's products are here.
More research to come, however, this is hilarious:
"When passenger of foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet him melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage then tootle him with vigor."
-car rental brochure in Tokyo.
Oh, the Japanese.
Just one of many ways that poor translation can lead to confusion, being less competitive in the world market, and hilarity.
Article with more details here, but biased because it is published by a translation company.
Wikipedia article on machine translation, the history of which goes back to the 1950s, when machines were in their heyday, and everyone wanted a machine to do everything. Why hire someone who speaks Russian and is probably a damn dirty Communist to translate, when you can have a clean running all-American machine to steal the Reds' secrets FOR you? Needless to say it didn't work out too well.
Online translation came much later, as the internet had to be invented by Al Gore before it could be possible. A Wikipedia article on SYSTRAN, one of the oldest and most prominent of machine translators, which powers Yahoo! translator, Babelfish, and Google translator. More information on SYSTRAN's products are here.
More research to come, however, this is hilarious:
"When passenger of foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet him melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage then tootle him with vigor."
-car rental brochure in Tokyo.
Oh, the Japanese.
posted by Tiffany Shropshire at 1:45 PM
1 Comments:
Here is an article devoted to the history of machine translation.
http://www.promt.ru/ru/technology/history.php
The article is in Russian, but it's not a problem, here is the English translation (machine translation)
http://www.translate.ru/url/tran_url.asp?lang=ru&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.promt.ru%2Fru%2Ftechnology%2Fhistory.php&direction=re&template=General&cp1=NO&cp2=NO&autotranslate=on&psubmit2.x=65&psubmit2.y=13
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