alfreda89: 3 foot concrete Medieval style gargoyle with author's hand resting on its head. (Default)
alfreda89 ([personal profile] alfreda89) wrote2012-09-13 12:35 pm

Alas, Babelfish

And then there are the days when a web page spends five minutes trying to get you to sign in with Facebook. When you click "No, thanks" it offers you a registration page you cannot get around. So, you give up and pop over to see what the separate Bing setup looks like (the same people, but different pages) and the system is fighting Firefox and No Script, neither liking the page. When you get the page to hold still, Bing's translator keeps printing the same French on the other side.

So I get to double-check my understanding of this word by word, it having been much too long ago that I took French:

Voici les dernières nouveautés du monde de l’entreprises

Here is the last novelty of world enterprise?

Babelfish could make incredible bloopers -- I learned to double check by translating back, to see what the system thought in reverse -- but I will miss its simple improvement of my understanding.

And they won't have me looking at their ads while waiting for my translation. May I suggest a FAIL? Must find a translator I like and install on the browser.

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