The Seattle Times reports that the Secretary of State’s website in Washington state had a machine translation system that wrought havoc with Chinese.

bq. …the Chinese translation was apparently way off. For example, a statement about Secretary of State Sam Reed proposing “statewide mandates to restore public trust” was translated as “Swampy weed suggests whole state order recover open trust,” …

By law, however, certain groups have to be given equal rights to access to election material. Chiense and Korean translations have now been removed from the website. Apparently the MT system is functioning adequately for Russian, Japanese, French, German, Spanish and Italian.

bq. Gachot said people who are “perfectly bilingual” quickly spot any errors in translation and tend to focus on the software’s shortcomings. “This service is for people who don’t speak very much English at all,” he said.

bq. He says the accuracy level is around 75 percent. That can be improved by tweaking the site, Gachot said, but it’s tough to get accurate translations on sites with a wide variety of topics and posted information that changes often.

Debby Hsu, a members of a lobbying group, who criticizes the system, says ‘having no translation is better than having very bad translation’.

(Via Taccuino di Traduzione)

In the entry House of Lords upholds Human Rights Act on December 17 2004, there was some heated discussion in the comments with the few select regular commenters here. I feel somewhat vindicated by today’s article in the Independent, headed Clarke ends terror suspects’ detention without trial. Incidentally, the powers to detain applied only with regard to foreigners.

However, it’s not going to be a tea-party for the ex-detainees:

bq. The Home Secretary Charles Clarke is to introduce “control orders” to curb the activities of suspected terrorists who, for various reasons, cannot be prosecuted, he told MPs.

bq. This would replace detention powers under the Anti-terrorism Crime and Security Act, 2001, which the Law Lords had ruled were incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights.

bq. He conceded that his plan would be “contentious” in that the new scheme would not include detention in prison, but would include a range of controls restricting movement and association, curfews and/or tagging and in some cases a requirement to remain at their premises.

The announcement was accompanied by the usual remarks about terrorism and how effective the powers have been.

Drool.

You can these headsets for under 30 euros on e-Bay.

(via join-the-dots)

My blog has had increased numbers of visitors recently. It looks as if I’m popular because people are looking for the answers to an Internet quiz. I’ve just had a look at the search words used to get here and counted 59 times in the past week or so permutations on “German twix”.

One of the comments on the entry Searching this site is this:

bq. Well, I can explain the ‘germany twix’ entries. There’s a site – http://deathball.net/notpron – that is a rather elongated and confusing puzzle which involves extensive use of google. Your site is one of the first to pop up for puzzle #7, which features a twix bar and the message “times have changed in deutschland”. Maybe you mentioned a twix bar at some point. :P

The notpron link is to a page giving a choice of English or German and headed ‘The hardest riddle available on the internet’ and ‘since August 2004’ (and the following page asks you to use Internet Explorer):

bq. *Don’t give up too early, it’s damn hard
* It’s NOT a point a click thing
* Don’t try to get spoilers, or you won’t have fun (those who don’t cheat have weeks of immense fun with this)!
Feel free to use the “hints” section on this site. Just for the start, to get into this!

Presumably the German language has led to no queries because the answer to the Twix question is so well known in Germany.

Visitors who don’t come looking for “German twix” usually come looking for IKEA.

This (from this site) is a gesture made by President Bush to greet the Texas Longhorn brass band last Thursday. It is called the Hook ’em, ‘horns salute and suggests a pair of horns.

In Norway, it created confusion, as it’s a salute to Satan (heavy metal again).

In American Sign Language it apparently means bullshit.

(Thanks to Derek)

LATER NOTE:

A commenter pointed out that the above picture is not correct, because the thumb should be folded over the nails of the turned-in fingers. Here is a better picture:

This comes from the site of K-Read Custom Promotions, selling a variety of foam (sponge rubber) hands. Minimum order is 100 pieces.

Carter also points out that there is a lengthy post on the topic on Language Log. There’s so much on Language Log that I don’t see it all nowadays. The article concludes, after citing email received, that all the linguistic information in the source is essentially incorrect!

Here’s an entry of Udo Vetter’s that I overlooked:

bq. Grußformel in einem Schreiben der Staatsanwaltschaft:

Hochachtungsvoll

Müller

Amtsanwalt (b)

bq. Das kleine b bedeutet “beauftragt”.

bq. So unterzeichnen Amtsanwälte, die zwar den Vorbereitungsdienst absolviert haben und im Amtsanwaltsdienst arbeiten, aber noch nicht zu Amtsanwälten ernannt sind. Das (b) darf frühestens nach zwölf Monaten gestrichen werden – wenn sich der Amtsanwalt, der keiner ist, im Amtsanwaltsdienst bewährt hat.

bq. Oder so ähnlich.

bq. Bei dieser Gelegenheit: Weiß jemand, was ein “Polizeihauptmeister m. AZ” ist?

The comments explain the last term:

bq. “m. AZ” heisst mit Amtszulage. A9 mit AZ ist der höchste Dienstgrad, den man als Beamter im mittleren Dienst bekommen kann. (xomment by Rpfl.)