Saturday, March 13, 2004

Portuguese and the Google translator

I ran across an article today referring to Portugal's most famous blogger of all time--I just had to take a look. The site is O meu pipi and has an extremely large following in Brazil. For those who did not do well in geography, Brazil is the largest Portuguese speaking country in the world.

Not being able to speak Portuguese, this was a perfect chance to try out Google's "translate to English" on the Google toolbar. So, once translated we find out the tagline for "My Pipi:"

"Blog to step on the risk of the bad taste, but without exceeding." Ah, the weakness of computer language translation rears it's ugly head:

I glimpsed my partner. I scared myself and I thought: Pipi, what it is this, shovel? Then you are to break this sopeira to the canzana or it she is you to make it a pin? Not, a canzana was same.

Ok, I'll pass on what that means. But I did discover that the Google translator did a very good job on the "F" word which appears very frequently on the site.