Translation apps aren’t great, and they’ll probably be getting worse, like Google has But I wonder if they’ll ever be as bad as the early 2000s, when my friend tried to write “How many times have I told you two not to fight” and it turned into “How many times have I told you two not to pro wrestle”

"I refuse to prove that I exist," says god "For proof denies faith and without faith I am nothing." "But," says man "The Babelfish is a dead giveaway. It proves you exist and so therefore you don't. QED." "Oh dear," says god "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

speaking as a computational linguist who graduated in 2001, this is absolutely fair. I mean, I’m not saying the field was unappealing, but I went into *radio* instead ffs.

I want to live in a universe where that's a common phrase in a household.

🎶Flip on the telly, wrestle with Jimmy🎶

I liked "I am not currently functional" as a translation of "I'm not working now"

one does not simply pro wrestle

That's good advice.

My favorite site was the one that ran stuff through Babelfish multiple times and you'd go from "I'm a little teapot short and stout" to "they are a small POTENTIOMETER"

Since moving to Japan, I've relied too much on the convenience of Google Translate & Deepl. Here are a couple of my favorites: a sign for produce at the supermarket, a note in the parents' Line group about upcoming wellness checks, and IMDB's (translated) localization for the film Girl, Interrupted.

I turned off the "enhanced" spellcheckers in Chrome and Edge yesterday and went back to the basic ones, after they both failed to resolve "tehy" into "they". It wasn't even in the list for the enhanced versions.