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Car Ice Cream for Dogs

This fascinating (and potentially useful) headline comes from an Indonesian newspaper after Google Translate had finished with it. There were a number of fascinating other things to read, including:

  • Train Miniature Rooms
  • Success Plastiki Skip the Pacific Ocean
  • Salad Dressing Women Arrested Police
  • Japanese PM Leadership Doubtful Wife
  • Elvis Autopsy Equipment Sale
  • The car is moving faster than a bullet
  • Car Ice Cream For Dogs

I’m sure that all of these articles made perfect sense in the original and it is possible to work out what some of them mean even in the translation. However, this shows how difficult machine translation really is. None of these headlines comes across as natural English and all of them are difficult to understand. We are not about to see machine translations of the Bible into minority languages any time soon, whatever the pundits say.

2 replies on “Car Ice Cream for Dogs”

The dog would get very excited about the last one: ‘Car Ice Cream For Dogs’. I don’t know what the original meant, but she would happily jump into the back of the car to lick out an ice cream carton!!

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