It is All Greek To Us
Since I am a bit of a numbers / statistics nerd, one of the more fascinating parts of blogging to me has consistently been watching where our incoming visitor traffic comes from (bonus: it also helps us discover new blogs to follow).
Unfortunately we will not be following a couple of the latest sites that linked to us. Why? Because they are written entirely in Greek. While I can read the Greek alphabet (a requirement of the fraternity I was in), reading a journal in that language is a bit of a stretch. But thanks to some suggestions from our friends on Twitter, we plugged the URLs into Google Translate to see what these sites were saying about us. Would they be kind? Would they be snarky? Turns out they were downright HILARIOUS.
The good news is that we immediately understood that they were intended to be kind (thanks folks!), but Google’s robotic translation of the language was also quite entertaining. In some cases it was simply plain inaccurate- but we were laughing so hard that it did not matter.
For instance, this site (according to Google Translate) noted that “the house team enjoyed passionately, and went and found an old house amid nature.” So despite trying to keep things PG around here, Google Translate clearly sees us as more of a romance novel.
Then Google chose we must be some kind of incomprehensible medical drama: “The spitoskylo apologize for diabetic shock may be caused by Glykeria this spectacle.” Hopefully our site is not truly causing diabetic shock over in the Mediterranean. Someone would tell us if it were, right? Either way, the spitoskylo does sincerely apologize.
A day after that interesting first post, a second Greek site also mentioned us. Again, Google took some liberties when it came to translating. It starts off quite complimentary: “When a couple has humor, lively, style and enjoy of decoration…” but does not end so well “…then the result can not be positive.” NOT be positive?! Where could humor, lively, style and enjoy not end well? On our site apparently.
Perhaps it has something to do with our “Terrible Do It Yourself” that they mention. We tried to double-check this one with Yahoo’s Babelfish site to see what was truly said, but it simply swapped “terrible” for “horribly.” Yowza! At least they went on to say our posts are “intelligent, entertaining and comprehensive” and even called us a “journal-haven for Do it yourself’ers!” Whew. It does not truly sound like they hate us after all.
So we are chalking it up to a prime example of things being lost in translation and we could not assist but share the amusing interpretation. We are sure you folks have some entertaining stories about times when a language barrier provided some comic relief. Do tell. Simply make sure it is in English or we might have to leave it up to Google Translate to fill us in…
PS: If you want to read the full original posts in Greek go here and here, or check out the Google translated versions here and here. And of course we sincerely thank both blogs for their remarkable write-ups! We are sorry Google did not do them justice but we appreciate them none the less (and even got a few laughs out of the whole thing).
