Reason #37 for Using a Professional Translator

Not more than a couple of weeks ago I posted about the Chinese restaurant named "Translate server error".

 Haha, only in China, I thought.  Then life, as she tends to do, showed me that I don't know nuthin'.

A dear friend of mine, who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty, is a webcartoonist.  (If you know her, please don't call her up and laugh maniacally.) A recent strip shows a Chinese journalist trying to use voice-recognition software to dictate a column, but the computer - baffled by her accent - continues to come back with "Sorry, I don't understand you."

And yes, it's politically incorrect, and no, I don't care.

She gets more and more frustrated, and finally the cartoonist wanted her to shout, in Chinese, "Take your program and shove it...!".

So, she dutifully goes to an English-Chinese translation site and enters her chosen phrase. The computer responds with several options, and she chooses one that she likes the look of.  And is very proud of herself as she manages to cut and paste the translation into her strip.

Well, I'm no sinologist, but I know enough about Hanzi to do a radical/stroke count search, and when I read the strip, I'm as curious as all getout to know what the poor lady is shouting at her machine (this is before I had gotten to the end of the story, you see).  But I was puzzled by what I was reading.  So I call my friend, and she tells me the story, and I gently had to explain to her what had happened.

Because I went to Babelfish and tried it.  And what I got was

採取您的節目并且推它您的驢子!

Like I said, I don't read Chinese, and didn't want to take the time to look up each character.  So I go to a different site, just to be fair, and see what comes out when I go back to English.  And what it gives me is, "Take program and push in donkey." (Remember, that's what the website gave me - I have no idea what it really says.) Trouble is, my friend wasn't even this lucky. So what she chose was:

"Information not found!". (or something to that effect)


We both understood, of course, that the strip works anyway because 99.9% of the population who would be reading this doesn't read Hanzi - but you can understand why I found this absolutely delicious.

And the punchline?

(Artwork copyright by a nameless and wonderful artist)