{"id":627,"date":"2010-09-22T01:22:00","date_gmt":"2010-09-22T01:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/2010\/09\/22\/hankie-enlightenment\/"},"modified":"2010-09-22T01:22:00","modified_gmt":"2010-09-22T01:22:00","slug":"hankie-enlightenment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/2010\/09\/22\/hankie-enlightenment\/","title":{"rendered":"Hankie enlightenment"},"content":{"rendered":"

I found an absolute gem in my automated search results this morning: a bio of a man I know fairly well, having worked for two of the organisations named in the piece. However, it turns out that I didn’t know him anywhere near as well as I thought I did. I never knew, for example, that this man “as good as graduated with a BSc in Biology”1<\/sup>, or that he has an “MSc in dungeon physiology”2<\/sup>. And apparently “during his healing precision he was severely shabby”3<\/sup>.<\/p>\n

I had no idea.<\/p>\n

Judging by the torturous grammar and hilarious word choices, the bio seems to have been dragged through several iterations of Google Translate (or possibly just translated by my cat Google, which is an equally good explanation).<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/div>\n
Google had a tough day on Sunday<\/i><\/div>\n

I’m guessing that someone with less than stellar English then replaced every second or third word using a random selection from a thesaurus.<\/p>\n

Now, we all know that science and spell checkers don’t mix, but apparently scientific language forms an even more disastrous partnership with automated translation tools and\/or careless thesaurus use. From disaster, however, springs hilarity: the cell\/dungeon confusion was funny enough, but my absolute favourite part was the translation of “tissue culture” as “hankie enlightenment”.<\/p>\n

Genius. <\/p>\n

As soon as I could stop laughing, I sent the link to several friends who also know the distiguished dungeon physiologist in question. One of them pointed out that the torturous translation process was no doubt intended to disguise the text’s origin as a plagiarised Wikipedia entry.<\/p>\n

Compare<\/a> and contrast<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It truly is a privilege to see such outstanding scholarship in action!<\/p>\n

——————–  <\/p>\n

1) the many instances of “as good as” seem to be replacements for “as well as”, “and”, & “also”
2) “dungeon” = “cell”
3) apparently, “severely shabby” = “greatly influenced”, as in by a particular mentor. I had to check this one against the original text.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I found an absolute gem in my automated search results this morning: a bio of a man I know fairly well, having worked for two of the organisations named in the piece. However, it turns out that I didn’t know … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,53,35,3,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english-language","category-furry-friends","category-photos","category-science","category-silliness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}