Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Inadvertant "Poetry" at Work

Sometimes in my job, I have to piece together translations in languages that I don't know. I did a good one in French today, and did OK on some Traditional Chinese. In both cases I had someone double check my work.

Japanese is easy - I do that all the time, but that's because I KNOW that language.

However, when I tried to do Korean for: "Hide Status View"

I came up with: 아니다 전시 상태 보기

(Not display Status View)... at least on my first try.

Babel Fish tells me I managed to write:
"The time of war condition which is not it sees,"

Oops.

My second try was better in Korean: 상태 보기 숨기기
Or, at least I thought it was, until I checked Babel Fish - and once again it was almost poetic:

"Condition it sees, it hides"

Apparently Korean is a really poetic language. Either that or I've missed my calling as a Korean poet. Or, BabelFish just sucks for Korean.

1 comment:

Holly said...

You should compose a book of these. :)