It was
"The Vodka is good but the meat is rotten."
This is the famous mistranslation of a the Russian proverb:
"The spirit is weak but the flesh is willing."
The translation was Russian > English, not English > Russian > English.
For the background on that story and machine translation in general, see
this Economist article.
And if you're into such issues check out http://fieldmethods.net
Sorry, but I'm a linguist... I can't resist questions about Basque. Basque is spoken in the Basque country, an area which coincides with northern Spain and southern France. The political relationship between Basques and the French and Spanish government is tense, and there is sometimes violence. You can read about it at this little page, which also has an introduction to the language. As for the writing system, Basque doesn't use any non-ASCII characters at all. But there's not a whole lot of Basque editions of O'Reilley books. Heh. Ten points if you send me an email and you know what 'ergative' means hee. (Basque is ergative.)
Slashdot Mirror
It was "The Vodka is good but the meat is rotten." This is the famous mistranslation of a the Russian proverb: "The spirit is weak but the flesh is willing." The translation was Russian > English, not English > Russian > English. For the background on that story and machine translation in general, see this Economist article. And if you're into such issues check out http://fieldmethods.net
I agree. Even that crazy Minor guy got a complementary copy. Of course, he was in jail and he wrote half of it, but it was complementary.
I guess it's just a prestige thing. I can't see people volunteering to work on a proprietary software project for prestige, tho.
Weird.
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Sorry, but I'm a linguist... I can't resist questions about Basque. Basque is spoken in the Basque country, an area which coincides with northern Spain and southern France. The political relationship between Basques and the French and Spanish government is tense, and there is sometimes violence. You can read about it at this little page, which also has an introduction to the language. As for the writing system, Basque doesn't use any non-ASCII characters at all. But there's not a whole lot of Basque editions of O'Reilley books. Heh. Ten points if you send me an email and you know what 'ergative' means hee. (Basque is ergative.)