Slapping the Brakeman

This...this is why plugging text into an online translator is just never going to be the same as giving it to an actual human.

I actually have nothing against translation websites – they're a great resource for getting at least a rough sense of something that's written in a language you don't speak at all. Often I'll plug a bit of text I want to understand from French or Russian or even Latin into Google Translate, just to get an idea of what it's even about.

But for actual, comprehensible news? Yeah, not so much.

Today I was translating a breaking news story for Spiegel Online; often on these things, it's helpful to me to search online for other occurrences of certain key phrases (or at least, my guess as to the English equivalent to certain key phrases in the German) so I can read up on the subject and be better informed when I then write/translate about it in English.

This news story was so new, though, that for a couple of the phrases, the only hits I got were for the original (German-language) Spiegel article itself – as well as an automated translation version of the article into English. (I could tell it was translated by a computer, rather than a human, because the first sentence began, "Chancellor Merkel presents itself...")

Such translations aren't much for the conveyance of actual news, but they can make for fun reading. My favorite here was the translation of the sentence, "Merkel schlug sich auf die Seite der Bremser."

"Schlagen" alone is a verb that means "to hit," but the whole phrase "sich auf die Seite von X schlagen" means "to side with X," while "Bremser" in this case means people who put on the brakes ("die Bremsen") about something – as opposed to people who literally have the job of applying brakes to a vehicle. So I translated the sentence as, "Merkel joined those putting on the brakes."

In the automated translation, though, it came out as, "Merkel slapped the side of the brakeman."

...And then I was sitting there in the office chortling out loud, because I was picturing German Chancellor Angela Merkel on a train, slapping the brakeman in his side as he works.


(If you're now curious, the final version of the article in English is here. You won't find that sentence quite as I described it above; in the final version the editors changed it slightly, to "Merkel also joined those applying the brakes.")