Ah, good old Google Translate.
I don’t have a Facebook account (because it’s trendy not to have one). But my wife showed me a post by a friend of both of us.
The friend posted the following:
Buiochas le dhia ta mo ras rite!!ta me ar muin na muice!!!
He’s over the moon that he has finished running a race he was competing in.
Now, he’s left out the sínte fadaí (accent marks). And there’s a couple of mistakes (I make many myself). But I’m happy that he’s practicing Irish and I understood what he means.
But Google Translate ain’t so forgiving! In an attempt to understand, my wife submitted the text in for a translation.
The result?
Thank god my system run! I am a pig urine!!!
Fair play Google! I tried it myself later today, and got a slightly different response:
Thank god my system run! I am on the pig urine!
A slight improvement, but this is a lesson in not ignoring one’s fadaí!
(Note if you’re lost: mún=urine)
That’s is sooo true. I have a friend who tries to understand things that I post on facebook in Irish using google translate but some of the stuff doesn’t even translate.
Well…yeah. You’re a human being; you can infer meanings and you actually *understand* language. A machine doesn’t; it’s just a collection of algorithms and suggestions. Of course it isn’t forgiving of mistakes. If you put 3 + 7 in a calculator when you meant to put in 3 + 8, you can’t really complain the calculator isn’t forgiving.
I got…Thank god my system I’m passing on the pig urine..
And then with the exclamation marks – Thank god I passed my System! I am a pig urine!
@Dan, apart from the funny bits, the point is that one should not use Google Translate to translate into Irish for anything but comprehension. So, don’t use it for tattoos. It does, however, work great for me when I get Slovene text from my inlaws and I need to translate it to English to (better) understand it.