Here is the description of the assignment.
Find something in a foreign language and use Google Translate and laugh about how awful it is. Its pretty easy to do if you use Google Chrome. Just go to a site in another language and select the translate to English button when it pops up (options – under the hood – check the box that says to offer translations). I think you can also use the main google.com to translate pages as well. If its a language you know, give an explanation of what it should be and list possible reasons it got messed up.
So here is what I did:
I put text???????????(kyou ha ame ga hutte masu)??in Japanese.
In English, that means ” It is rainig today.”
I put this text just because it is rainig today.
The answer I got was
I rainig today??? lol
If you read this weird sentense, you might kinda get a sense what it’s about… but this translation is not good…
I knew that Google Translate does not work well, especially between English and Japanese but I did not expect this bad. (worse than my horrible English… :P)
The original sentence was so simple and I thought this couldn’t go wrong.
The subject sentence is ??(today), not ?(I). I have no idea why it translated like this.
Google Translate might be fun to mess up and laugh about but it is not for academic use like many people point out that google translate cannot be depended on :(
Well, I tried a second try changing a little bit of the original sentence.
I rewrote it from spoken language into formal, written Japanese, just adding ???.
The result I got was this
Google Translated successfully for this time!! :)
Maybe Google Translate is not so bad???
or is it just an miracle? :P
_________________________
The process of this assignment:
I used Google Translate and tried some translation from Japanese into English. I took these pictures step by step with my iphone and uploaded to Flickr and then embeded here.
