Computers are seen as the blight and the blessing of the modern world. However, it’s not the computers that are inherently evil, it’s what you do with them. I have found that the most evil thing that you can do with a computer is use it to translate an elementary school lesson plan from Japanese into English. Here is an excerpt from today’s lesson plan.1 – A teacher teaches the right, the left, the front, the back, a word of sit down, stand up, jumping to children while gesturing you.
2 – Sit down on the one step jumping place to the back where one step jumps before where one step jumps to the one step jumping left to the right; stand up.
3 – Close: Mr Colin gives instructions three times last. The last is said to “put up the right hand” and does goodbye in spite of being a swing.
Personally, I love the ballsy use of the semi-colon in #2, following what can only be described as a certificate 18 butchering of the English language. So, we can put a man on the moon, and we can bounce information around the globe at the touch of a button, but we can’t design a program capable of translating Japanese to English (or vice versa). It makes me feel better about my linguistic failings when a computer capable of a billion calculations a second can’t differentiate between a verb and a noun.
I poke fun at this translation, but it’s tongue in cheek – no one, man nor machine, is perfect. Just today I straight-facedly told a six year old that: “I read a lot of water.” I obviously meant to say: “I drink a lot of water”, but this is an easy mistake to make in Japanese (the difference is yomu (read) versus nomu (drink). However, being the teacher, and thus (largely by default) her superior, she didn’t question my statement. A look took over her face, which told me she was thinking “wow, foreigners can speak English and READ water!!”
I have a good friend who once told a table of terrified students that he eats children for breakfast. He meant to say fruit.
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