Well, time once again to trot out the story of the guy in my school who got caught using some primitive translation software to cheat on his French homework after turning in 500 words discussing the rise of "Jean Marie Le-Stylo"
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Up there with the other kid who got his auxiliary verbs confused in his GCSE oral talking about pets, and instead of saying "mon poisson est violet" (my fish is purple) said "mon poisson a été violé" (my fish has been raped).
My mortification could hardly have been greater than when, living in Paris aged 14, I called a girl I was dancing with ‘mon cher’. She gave me such a disappointed look.
I once had a student doing a first year philosophy essay in Aristotle’s Political Animal argument, and who put “Aristotle Quotes” into Google and then liberally sprinkled his essay with quotes from Aristotle Onassis.
I had students desperately trying to figure out how to say "f**k you" in Spanish (as if there's only one way 🙄). My favorite was the kid who came up with "Tornillo Ud." 😂Tornillo is a noun- "screw" & you'd definitely want to use the polite "Ud" 😂😂😂
Not sure about Spanish but certainly in French it's a specifically funny/aggravating bit for native speakers when you're really going hard at insulting someone to combine the worst insults imaginable with the polite form of "you"
In my French class (7th grade), we had to put on a play. We asked our teacher how to say “hijack,” so we looked pretty silly when we stood up there talking about our plane being bonjour Jacques-ed.
I recently chanced across the website of an orchestral musician. Absolutely fine English, up to the mention of working with the conductor Charles of the Roof.
I recall reading Spike Milligan talking about listening to Verde and wondering how such wonderful music could be written y someone named Joe Green. (Obviously not quite on topic as he didn't misuse translation software).
Had to read Jean de Florette for class. Too lazy to look up crucial words, I skimmed and assumed “Le bossu” and “la bosse” were a bullied husband and bossy wife. La bosse is feminine! Must be a lady!
Le bossu in fact means hunchback, and la bosse was the hunch. My essay did not go well.
I got caught doing that as we were writing about our hometown, unfortunately I am from Reading so wrote a long passage about living in ‘La lecture’ 🤦♂️
I remember in France when to be called a "Penniste" was the equivalent of being called a penis or a dick. The French I knew who could speak some English thought it up and it was very funny hearing them say 'Penniste' with a fake English accent.
In a discussion with a French food production company my colleague asked what preservatifs (condoms) they were using, absolute hilarity at the poor devil who realised his French wasn’t as good as he thought!
For real? I mean, she probably got that before but in a test that is a bit...well, not good.
It´s like in essays they forget to delete sentences like "as a large language model I can´t convey feelings"
The European Commission has long been a pioneer in using machine translation, but users are warned they need to revise.
A friend wrote the minutes of a meeting, including a list of participants, which came back with our colleague Olivier Brunet helpfully translated as "Brownish Olive-tree". 😄
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(Also love the fact that a joke earlier in the paragraph, about the first thing they do when you become PM, was later used (more or less verbatim) in the Helen Mirren film 'The Queen'! http://www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=204
https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/light-and-shadow-review-mark-colvins-memoir-of-life-with-his-father-the-spy-20161201-gt1wvk.html.
Wrong Homer. 🤣
This is a screenshot of the host's reaction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1d3lIcuEMU
(No software involved)
Le bossu in fact means hunchback, and la bosse was the hunch. My essay did not go well.
It´s like in essays they forget to delete sentences like "as a large language model I can´t convey feelings"
A friend wrote the minutes of a meeting, including a list of participants, which came back with our colleague Olivier Brunet helpfully translated as "Brownish Olive-tree". 😄