From: William Crawford <wccrawford@...>
Date: 2006-08-30T20:37:05+09:00
Subject: Re: How to spy on the Japanese Rubists

Paul Robinson wrote:
> On 29 Aug 2006, at 23:50, Max Muermann wrote:
> 
>> Translating the Rubist Magazine FAQ came up with the following gem:
>>
>> Q. there is no article of the ~~ in the [ru] [bi] [ma] why?
>> Motivation bean jam?
>>
>> I too get Motivation bean jam sometimes... it's not something I would
>> talk about in mixed company, though.
> 
> That's such a great name for a Ruby blog...
> 
> In fact, we could turn 'Engrish' back on itself and do thousands of
> new t-shirts off this tool. I'd wear a t-shirt depicting Motivation
> bean jam. Maybe.
> 
> Why is machine translation so bad anyway? It's only changing one set
> of vocabulary and grammar for an equivalent set - it would seem that
> the biggest problem with most tools out there is ridiculously small
> foreign language dictionaries and tiny grammar rule sets. Very odd,
> and probably quite easy to fix.

Their language is based more upon sounds than most.  Each character 
represents a sound, and then sounds together create a word.  Our letters 
do have sounds, but the complete sound is only made with a combination 
of letters.  'rubima' (Ruby Magazine) can only be written 1 way in their 
language, and apparently also means 'motivation bean jam'.  Any time 
they shorten something like that, it's almost assured to also mean 
something else.  The translator has no way of knowing this was a short 
form of other words, and does its best to translate.

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