machine translation

Back in November, I discussed what happened when Tom Cruise used machine translation to connect to his Indians fans. Since I am in Japan, I come across bad English translations on a daily basis. I hadn’t posted any on Linguistrix because Chinglish/Janglish is very common stuff and you get them dime by the dozen. But today I found this one that is incomprehensible in at least two languages (I have to check up my Chinese friend to find out whether it makes any more sense in Chinese than it does in English/Hindi.

A recent tweet by Tom Cruise shows us the perils of machine translation and literal translation. The first part of the tweet is of course absolutely unidiomatic, but you can figure out what it is trying to say. But the second part will flummox any reader who is not familiar with English expressions. This was obviously the result of English—>Hindi machine translation of something like “We are really looking forward to talking to our friends in India when @GhostProtocol comes out soon.