Posts Tagged ‘dutch’
Angry Twitter mobs wield ‘twitchforks’ in worldwide attacks
Shortly after the devastating 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Microsoft tweeted the following message from its Bing Twitter account: “How you can #SupportJapan? For every retweet, @Bing will give $1 to Japan quake victims, up to $100K.” The response from the Twitter public was not at all what Microsoft intended. An angry mob pounced [...]
Get Out of Jail Free with Google Mistranslation
In a 2010 legal mishap, “a Russian trucker in (the Netherlands) involved in a bar brawl was released because the (court) summons he received was poorly translated from Dutch into Russian using Google Translate,” reported the Dutch-English news blog 24oranges. Instead of reading, “you are to appear in court on 3 August 2010,” as it [...]
Google Translate has great uses, disastrous misuses
Google Translate and other free online translation tools can be great for instant, informal translation. When expectations are properly set, particularly for low-value text, unedited machine translation can be quite useful. However, when a user overestimates machine translation capabilities, the results can be confusing at best. When one online [...]
Poll: Top Translation Blunders of 2010
Translation blunders made news throughout the year 2010. By translation blunders, we are not referring to urban legends like President John F. Kennedy's alleged slip-up saying "I am a jelly doughnut" - that never happened. Nor are we referring to Dave Barry's satirical claim, "The CEO of Toyota appears before a congressional committee and [...]
Localizing Humor
According to the article, "I don't get it: Humor lost in translation," it can be difficult to translate humor from one language or culture to another. Translators can sometimes find equivalent jokes that will be funny in the target language, but here are a few resources to help identify country-specific humor and jokes: Reader's Digest, "The [...]
Israeli Journalists and a Dutch Diplomat
Machine translation is appropriate for some situations and very inappropriate for others, as explained in the article "Machine translation can bring blunders, successes in international business." In (one) instance, Israeli journalists nearly set off an international incident when they sent a list of machine-translated questions to a Dutch [...]
Language and Country Codes
Many multilingual websites are organized using subdomains and subdirectories based on language codes or country codes. These are usually ISO codes. See the following example that Google gave for a French website in Canada using the alpha-2 code for the French language: French language code subdirectory: www.example.ca/fr French language code [...]
Language and Country Names List
English speakers expect that a link to an English language/country option on a website will be listed in English, not translated into another language. Otherwise, how easily would an English speaker find a link to English content if the language name were written in Asian, Cyrillic, or Middle Eastern characters? Or how easy would it be if the [...]
World Cup Translation Bloopers
The New York Times recently noted that at least 17 languages are spoken by 32 teams at the 2010 World Cup, and FIFA referees have supposedly been brushing up on cursing in those languages so they know when to eject a player for committing the offense of "Using offensive, insulting or abusive language and/or gestures." Even in an international [...]
Microsoft Language Portal Update Includes Office 2010 International Terminology
The Microsoft Language Portal has recently been updated to include International Terminology from Office 2010 in 90 languages. As mentioned previously, Microsoft has produced great free resources for download and/or search that include all of its style guides and glossaries, which can double as translation memory.
