How fun can language be? afl. 49

I haven't had much time this week to collect language-miskleunen. Although, some very nice ones have come by but I save them for episode 50. Still a milestone, roughly estimated about 1000 strange statements and

This week I had quite a bit of translation work to do. Because I live in Romania, have many German-speaking friends, get English-language forms sent and I am negotiating with a French-speaking housesitter, it is not just about translations from/to Dutch. For example, from Romanian to English and to know exactly what I have written, both translated again into Dutch. Except for French, I can speak very well with the different languages but in writing...?

I used to spend hours lugging with dictionaries but nowadays there is Google Translate. Not the only translation machine but perhaps the most used. I have tried other free translation machines. One is slow, the other is not really easy to use and all they have their problems.

On a facebook page for Dutch people living abroad there was a discussion about the use of translation programs and the pros and cons. Someone posted an example of some very strange translations and with that the fun started. Google Translate has a button that makes it easy to translate back and forth. You would say that it should always produce the same result, but nothing is less true. The end result sometimes yields the most hilarious results that could be quite miserable. I translated between Dutch, English, German and Romanian. A few other members used Bulgarian, Hungarian, Swedish and Russian.

The first thing that noticed was that the word 'me' or 'me' is often translated into 'my', linked to the nearest noun. “It will make me sausage. creature” then becomes “It will be my sausage”. Bulgarian makes it even more beautiful: “This will be my sausage”. A not unimportant difference. “I am annoyed” goes well in many languages. Only Romanian comes out to “I am upset”.