I’ve been having some fun with the testing site this morning. And especially with translations. A colleague at work asked about the possibility of me doing a couple of pages in Dutch on this site. And while I may do a couple of pages at some point, I simply don’t have the time (alternative theory: I’m simply to lazy) to translate most of the site. So I decided to muck about with some PHP and come up with some automated translation links.

That led to me playing around with Google Translate and Yahoo’s Babelfish, trying to decide which does a the better job of translating. It’s difficult to say that for sure, since both end up rendering some parts readable and some completely garbled (just never the same parts for some reason).

I had some good laughs at that and decided I couldn’t possibly deny people who don’t read Dutch similar laughs when they read my site. So I came up with a neat little trick to have Google translate Yahoo’s Dutch back into English. Most of that translation is Hilarious enough to start with. But one thing in particular caught my eye.

The place name “Apeldoorn” in this post is translated into English as “Calcutta”. I don’t know where than error came from, but it’s a thing of beauty. On the other hand, maybe I should call my mother to make sure she hasn’t moved without telling me. But then again, why would she tell Google…

Just in case they get that translation fixed any time soon click this link for a screenie of the translation (Calcutta is in the bottom right hand corner on this shot).