A lot of translations are made by computer algoritms which are rarely readable.

I came across this picture on the internet. The chinese text is CAN1TING1 餐厅 ("dining hall")

 Is that a printed banner or a digital display? I don't think that printing banners that size is cheap _anywhere_, so I'm surprised at the total lack of QA. Of course, to someone who has no knowledge of english, "dining hall" looks probably just as reasonable as "translate server error".

And this folks, is why we use exceptions, rather than special return values, when a function fails.

 I always use Exception.toString()...

Please, someone tell me this is fake.

I saw some translation fuckups in my time, worst of which was famous tagline, which some bumbler understood as:,,Let the unit always escort you."  Originally ,,May the Force be with you." No kidding.

 But this sets a new low...

 gotta ask ... why do you favour the commacomma blah blah doubleqoute style of quoting?

Sorry...Very bad education turned into very bad habit. Or in another words, fifty years old battered typewriter in the hands of eight year old wannabe sci-fi author. Please, don´t ask. I am working on it though.

This is FAILBlog-worthy!

dysmas:

«gotta ask ... why do you favour the commacomma blah blah doubleqoute style of quoting?»

 

Check out this table of various quoting syles used around the world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark%2C_non-English_usage

The ,,quote`` style is very common in Germany. Example: Certain popular Newspapers.Yet others use "normal" quotes however.

One of my favorite related cartoons...I'll steal the translation from a blog comment rather than botch my own.

The speech balloon says "really hot digital tattoo, look the cool dragon head!"

And on his back one can read "Error: File 'dragonhead.jpg' not found"

 

 

 

Teun:

I came across this picture on the internet. The chinese text is CAN1TING1 餐厅 ("dining hall")

and now I know where "Cantina" came from.

 

(Correction: it's an italian word originally.)

 Oh My God ...

 Maybe it's just an ad for a new company called "Translate Server Error"?

TheDude:

 Maybe it's just an ad for a new company called "Translate Server Error"?

Oh! That sounds ... interesting. Maybe they'll be able to finally translate that error window I get in Spanish-configured Windows installations:

Error: La memoria no se pudo "read" en el segmento 0x00345229

(Error: Memory could not be "read" in segment 0x00345229)

Nandurius:

dysmas:

«gotta ask ... why do you favour the commacomma blah blah doubleqoute style of quoting?»

 

Check out this table of various quoting syles used around the world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark%2C_non-English_usage

The ,,quote`` style is very common in Germany. Example: Certain popular Newspapers.Yet others use "normal" quotes however.

 

In the dutchspeeking part of Belgium it is also common to write comma-comma. Although you type just ". If your language and fontsettings are correct, any modern wordprocessor will display the first " as a double comma.

sibtrag:

One of my favorite related cartoons...

You managed to present a cartoon that relates to both the main topic (bad translation due to error condition) and the secondary topic (,,"-quoting, as shown in « 2. ,,Start" wählen »). Nice job!

George Nacht:

Please, someone tell me this is fake.

 

 

It's fake.

Does it make you feel better when we lie to you? :-)

osuwizzard:

Does it make you feel better when we lie to you? :-)

It makes me feel better to know that people will still come by and ressurect this thread a week later to add something trivial and lame.

This is FAILBlog-worthy!

And here it is: http://failblog.org/2008/07/22/translation-fail/