- Wednesday, 11 November 2009
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God gives the nuts but he does not crack them - German proverb
BabelFish causes diplomatic incident
ONLINE translator Babelfish has sparked an international incident after some Israeli hacks used it to translate a letter to the Dutch Foreign Ministry.
The email contained five questions that the hacks wanted answered by the Dutch Foreign Minister about a trip they were making as guests of the government.
Since there is a shortage of Dutch people who speak Hebrew, the hacks stuck the email through the internet translation site Babel Fish and sent it.
The Dutch were shocked that the hacks wanted to know "The mother your visit in Israel is a sleep to the favour or to the bed your mind on the conflict are Israeli Palestinian".
Follow up questions included: "Why we did not heard on mutual visits of main the states of Israel and Holland, this is in the country of this" and "What in your opinion needs to do opposite the awful the Iranian of Israel".
According to the Jerusalem Post, the Dutch were not amused and are talking about cancelling the hacks' trip.
An Israeli diplomat asked the paper how this email could possibly have been sent as the journalists have sparked a "major, major incident."
Apparently Babel Fish mistakes the Hebrew word for "if" (ha'im) for the Hebrew word for "mother" (ha'ima), and reckons "the Dome of the Rock" can reasonably be rendered in English as "bandages of the knitted domes".
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I'm guessing the word used was "ืืื", pronounced "Ha'im" (if) or "Ha'em" (The mother). On the bright side - at least it didn't translate it into "Ham".
I can't find any support for Hebrew in Babel Fish. So maybe the journos used a different translation site, or tried to translate from English to Dutch. Either way the Grauniad story is dubious.
I HIGHLY doubt the dutch officials would be phased at all by this, so it sounds like a bit of a 'nice read, print it' embellishment story.
Also there are a surprising number of hebrew speaking dutch, and visa versa.
Furthermore normally the communication is done in English since most all of the dutch and most Israelis speak that.
I don't care which post put it up...plain FUD...

These people would be speaking English & if not they would not speak/communicate.

Besides...who the f*** translates something and sends it off without checking??

Who reads a broken email with obvious grammatical discountiuity that makes little to no sense and thinks "holy crap, these israelis said WHAT about my mother??"

Fact is, both countries would rather talk about something like that and smoke the peace pipe...as both do alot of such smoking...
What nonsense. There was a translation failure, and the reason is understood. No reason to get upset. Now shake hands and play nicely, all of you.
Babel Fish Translation doesn't offer Hebrew-English translation. Had the JPost's reporter checked the facts, or correctly copied them from the site where the story was originally published, she would have known that the translation tool used was Babylon.