Like this?
The state of Ohio has replaced lethal injection with a head-ripping machine as a form of execution.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/satire/headripper.asp
At the Wollongong steelworks, Rudi was one of our rough diamonds. I worked there with documents from Japan. One of the parts lists of items to be delivered contained the part “Fuck”. We all had a chuckle at this, until one of the participants pointed it out to the Japanese representative. The Japanese representative wanted to know what “Fuck” meant. So Rudi showed him.
this size
in this colour
Was reading tonight the book “Fish who answer the telephone”.
It includes a hundred or so crazy mistranslations from Chinese into English that appear in two books.
“The new Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English in Two Parts” written in Peking contains common phrases like “At what o’clock is to get up?” and “I have pains on to conceive me.” as well as Proverbs such as “He sleep as a marmot.” and “The stone as roll not heap up not foam.”
The other book is “Correctly English in Hundred Days” which begins “This book is prepared for the Chinese young man who wishes to served for the foreign firms. It divided nealy hundred and ninety pages. It contains full of ordinary speak and write language. This book is clearly, easily, to the Chinese young man or scholar.”
——-
In other words, not quite as bloodcurdlingly awful as Google Translate, but getting there.
——
The original book “Fish who answer the telephone” is an interesting piece of scientific work. Using the methods of Pavlov (the telephone replaces the bell) it answers the question “How good is the hearing of fish?”.
> In other words, not quite as bloodcurdlingly awful as Google Translate, but getting there
For example, translating “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” into Chinese and back again using Google translate gives “In the jungle a bird in the hand is worth two”
Feel free to add your own observations of web-based translators.
