On Mon, 17 Mar 2008 18:17:33 -0500 (CDT), Robert Nichols
wrote:

In article , Jon Elson wrote:
:
:
oug Miller wrote:
:
: Interestingly, when you *do* click on "more info" you get exactly the same
: description, but in much more conventional English -- nearly fluent, in fact.
: For instance, instead of "ne'er foliage the valve staunch", it reads "never
: leaves the valve stem".
:
:Foliage = leaves? Oh, that's a DEAD giveaway this was a
:computer-generated translation!
:
:Stem = staunch, as in flowing blood, same thing.

Sorry to disagree, but even the dimmest translation program would not
dig so far into uncommon words and usage. IMO, that text was generated
quite deliberately by someone who knew exactly what they were doing.
And, it's having the desired effect -- getting lots of exposure and
causing people to click on the "more info" links.


About 60 years ago I was living in Japan and Japanese instruction
manuals of that time read much like the Chinese ones of today. I got
the idea of providing a translation service to provide proper English
language manuals for companies that lacked competent english language
skills. I went so far as writing a prospectus and visiting a number of
companies.

Thank God I didn;t give up my day job as every company I visited was
absolutely certain that their manuals were written in perfect English.
Of course, the individual making that decision was the guy that wrote
the manual as few Japanese, in those days, who worked in factories,
spoke fluent english.

I have a number of by-lingual Chinese friends and we have discussed
some of these manuals and they tell me that translated word by word
back into Chinese they make perfect sense.




Bruce-in-Bangkok
(correct email address for reply)