This led to a whole new French vocabulary for computer terms. While almost every language uses “byte” or something quite similar, in French it is “octet”. This is a more precise term if you really mean eight bits and no other system specific number, but it is unusual. Actually, I wonder what the French would call a byte on a system where a byte is not eight bits. Fortunately these are rare.

Fun with automatic translators:

When I was a child I heard a story, almost certainly apocryphal, in which the military made a computer which could do automatic translation. When demonstrated to the brass, one of them asked it to translate “out of sight, out of mind” into Chinese. The machine output some Chinese characters, but none of those present could read Chinese. So they had the machine translate the result back into English. It output “invisible idiot”.

It is interesting and illuminating to feed the result of automatic translation back into the translator, and the results can be quite amusing. This may help highlight places where the machine has trouble with context, idiom, or usage. Of course it is no guarantee that it got the first translation correct, even if it comes back correct when re-translated.

Also note that it is possible and not too damaging to translate a web page into its original language. I’ll leave the application of this as another exercise for the reader.

Finally, my all-time favorite web translator, which sadly disappeared long ago, was the “T’inator” which translated (pitied) a web page into the language of Mr. T. My favorite translation was “research” into “jibba-jabba”.

Google definitely does better than Y! with translating in context. For instance, if you enter the German phrase “rot, weiss, und blau,” Y! will turn that into “red, knows, and blue,” considering “weiss” to be a conjugation of the verb “wissen” (to know), rather than a colour. Google will get it right (”red, white, and blue”), and will also turn “er weiss die blau” into the somewhat nonsensical “he knows the blue”, understanding that “er weiss” now makes it the verb.

A German friend once pointed me to an item on German eBay that had obviously been machine-translated from a badly written English original. In the payment instructions, it said “Kein Kabeljau.” I’ll leave that one as an exercise for the reader.