Get Lost in Translation

Today sees a first for this site: there are now two lines of non-Roman script below the comments boxes on these posts to warn off the spam farms. The fact that spammers continue to attempt to post comments to this post can surely only be explained by their not reading English.

The simplified Chinese isn’t a perfect translation, because I plugged what Google Translate gave me back into itself to check, and got “The comment is slowing, so the spam will not appear”, which wasn’t quite what I was after. So this is actually a translation of “Comments are reviewed, so spam will never appear”, which translates back to itself perfectly at Google Translate. Babel Fish retranslates it as “The commentary will be examined, therefore, the junk mail will never appear”, which is near enough. Dictionary.com’s translator gives “Comments will be reviewed, and therefore, the spam will never appear”. I think they’ll get the message.

But why stop at Chinese? I’ve added Russian as well, because Cyrillic is cool. Dictionary.com retranslate’s Google’s output as “Comments are moderated, so that spam will never appear”, which is good, while Babel Fish gives “Commentaries [moderiruyutsya], so that to [spam] never it will appear”, which is odd.

Not speaking Russian or Mandarin myself, I’m going to have to trust the machines here, unless any learned readers can improve on the translations for me. Note that I won’t consider you a learned reader if you insist that I “must look at this louis vuitton shop online to your friends”.

Of course, this is probably just a stop-gap measure before I turn off comments again completely in exasperation.

15 April 2012 · Site News

I realise the spammers might all just be bots, but I’ve forgotten how to write “10 GOTO HELL” in machine code.

Added by Rory on 15 April 2012.