As a bit of a numbers and statistics nerd, one of the most interesting parts of running a blog is watching where our incoming traffic comes from. Beyond being useful for analytics, it’s a great way to discover new blogs to follow.
Recently a couple of sites linked to us — but we won’t be following them. Why? They were written entirely in Greek. I can read the Greek alphabet (a requirement from my fraternity days), but reading full posts in Greek is more than I can manage. With some helpful suggestions from friends on Twitter, we plugged those URLs into Google Translate to see what they were saying about us. Would they be kind or snarky? The translations turned out to be downright hilarious.
The good news: the posts were clearly intended to be complimentary. The bad news: Google’s robotic translations took some creative liberties. In many cases the result was inaccurate, but it was so funny that we didn’t mind.
For example, one site’s translation declared that “the Sherry and John loved passionately, and went and found an old house amid nature.” While we aim to keep things fairly PG here, Google Translate clearly imagined a romance novel version of our blog.
At other times the translation veered into the absurd: “The spitoskylo apologize for diabetic shock may be caused by Glykeria this spectacle.” We sincerely hope our site isn’t causing diabetic shock across the Mediterranean. If it were, someone would probably let us know — and apparently the spitoskylo offered an earnest apology.
A day later, another Greek site mentioned us. Again Google translated it with a few odd turns: it began kindly — “When a couple has humor, fun, style and love of decoration…” — and then concluded strangely — “…then the result can not be positive.” Not positive? That’s a peculiar way to sum up humor, fun, style and a love of decorating, but clearly the translation missed the intended nuance.
The same post also referenced our “Terrible Do It Yourself.” We tried a second translation tool to double-check the phrasing; it simply swapped “terrible” for “horribly,” which was a bit dramatic. On the bright side, the post went on to call our entries “intelligent, entertaining and comprehensive” and even labeled the site a “blog-haven for Do it yourself’ers!” So despite the odd wording, the sentiment was flattering.
We’re chalking all this up to the classic pitfalls of machine translation and couldn’t resist sharing the amusing results. Language barriers can lead to some great comic relief — and we’re sure many readers have their own entertaining examples. If you’ve experienced funny or bizarre translations, share them — in English if possible, or we’ll leave the rest to Google Translate.
PS: If you’d like to see the original Greek posts or the machine-translated versions, the posts are available on the original sites and via translation tools. We sincerely thank both blogs for their kind write-ups — even if Google didn’t quite capture the intended meaning. We appreciated the shout-outs and the laughs they brought.