Here’s an interesting snatch of machine translation I edited recently:
Source: “Ich habe mich wirklich gefreut! Ehrlich!”
Machine translation: “I was really mad! Raw!”
Actual meaning: “I was really happy! Honestly!”
Well, that’s a fail. “Sich freuen” and “ehrlich” aren’t even the kind of words that have really different translations depending on the context. This was just mystifyingly wrong.
In contrast, sometimes the stars align just right and the Universe presents you with a text where the perfect translation is obvious and even better than the original. This happened the other day while I was translating a retail website. For an item with a creative, unusual plaid pattern, the German copy began:
Karomuster ist spießig? (Plaid is bourgeois?)
And of course the only possible translation is:
Think plaid is square?
YES!