Internet translations are Funny Peculiar

‘French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde formally announced his candidacy,’ wrote Chinese website WTWHW last week. Is there anything Christine won’t do to try and get the job? I’m not sure, but clearly the site thought the androgynous wannabe IMF chief faced an uphill struggle. ‘Since 1945, IMF President are from Europe,” WTWHW continued, ‘but BRIC Five Tuesday issued a joint statement strongly worded appeal to break this, a stale, unwritten stereotypes’.

I doubt if Mme Lagarde will face tougher criticism than this during her whistle-stop world tour (‘Around the World for 80 votes’) but the site’s final conclusion was if anything quite encouraging: ‘Some countries on the selection of her not so positive, but no other candidates to choose from, Lagarde’s advantage is obvious.’ Yup, it’s hard to fault the logic in that.

Changing its mind again, WTWHW cautioned that ‘there may be lawsuits Lagarde, this is not good candidates’. So listen up candidates, no more of that lawsuit nonsense. The Chinese author then managed to turn her prosecutor Jean-Louis Nadal into a tennis player (Rafael Nadal) and accomplice Bernard Tapie into a new blip on the radar – her estranged husband Taipi Lagarde, a person I’ve Googled uphill and down dale, in vain.  The site concluded that the candidate would ‘want to continue to maintain this legacy expectations’, and I’m sure we all wish her the best of luck in pursuing that quest.

It is of course easy to take the mickey out of Asian English, but this is a huge site that has forgotten the first rule of international communications: don’t skimp on the translator. In translating the KFC campaign ‘It’s fingerlickin’ good’ into Chinese  many years ago, the agency wound up running billboards promising that KFC ‘is like eating your fingers’. I’m all for honesty in advertising, but that’s a truth too far.

Google itself needs to learn this lesson, except it never will. This is because techies and geeks and other silo-dwellers probably communicate in binary columns of numbers, but whatever the truth of it is, Google Translate is an utterly useless product. Unless one is trying to understand an article in Irdu or Serbo-Croat, it’s much better to simply read the original.

As I’m sure you know already, the Google service is computerised. The experience of reading a translation produced in this way is comfortingly familiar, in that it’s rather like reading a software manual: nothing in the manual looks or sounds anything like the reality, and none of it makes any sense. This is their translation of the French site Gala’s recent coverage of des scandales de Lagarde:

Sour milk, buttermilk and soft leg raise controversy in Bercy and Christine Lagarde is all his brie. 

‘After months of bitter struggle against unemployment and the fermentation of GDP, our Norman-heeled is facing a stinky story. The members of the Brotherhood of the Companions of Brie de Meaux launched a solemn appeal to the Wonder Woman of Le Havre for the return of Brie de Meaux at the table of the department…’

Now clearly, there’s a bit of a cheese gag going on here. Call me wild, but cheese – smelly – scandal….yes, I’m getting….er, I’ve no idea actually. The Norman-heeled soft leg intrigues me – mind you, I do have a history of perversion: but what is this thing about Lagarde’s gender? Search me, but it’s all his brie so yah-boo sucks.

I may be in danger of getting serious for a minute here, but online translations sum up everything that’s bad about the web. They’re sloppy, they don’t help, they’re done on the cheap, and they mislead. Their only saving grace, in fact, is in being unfailingly funny….but somehow I doubt if that was the intention back at base. I make an exception in the case of Christine Lagarde, because she is unreservedly (and undeservedly) full of herself – and painfully pushy: so anything that ridicules her is fine by me. Even in the Gala piece, the fact that most French commentators think she’s a prat still comes through loud and clear: she is rarely referred to as anything beyond  ‘the White Tornado’ and her slender body ‘is the result of years of synchronised swimming’. But towards the end, the article lapses into the hilariously impenetrable again:

‘To defuse this bomb smelly, Laurent Wauquiez said the case on his Facebook page. He broke the crust and spoke of “one of these runaways ridiculous media-political sphere we sometimes reserve”.
Hopefully this decision-heads (and pie boxes) do not nail the beak to our super Cricket!‘

My God, yes. Imagine how terrible that would be?