My dear guest, this may not be for you if you don’t understand Dutch and have no interest in translation, but I just can’t avoid sharing this with anyone who does.

I’m translating a long big text with mostly broken sentences from Dutch into English with the help of a translation programme (otherwise, how could I translate more than 5000 words a day …). It is quite tedious and disheartening because it concerns mostly answers like “I want privacy”, “I love to be on my own” etc., but it’s somewhat understandable because it’s about holiday solutions. Anyway, here, one translatable original sentence says, “staat me niet aan”.

Well, the programme uses outside translation engines as well and as a first suggestion, it gives me the MateCat solution, which starts out, in this case, from an original that said, “Regelaar staat niet aan.” Fine, some similarity all right, could be used. The program says it has a 70% match as a solution – mind you, the match is supposed to be a match to my original sentence.

So, what do I get as a solution? Are you sitting? Well, it says, “Regelaar staat niet aan.” Yes, in Dutch. It is exactly the same as their original source sentence – 100%. In a translation into English. It is a 70% match, it says, right?

Being a translator instead of a teacher is nice and quiet. And sometimes very (VERY!) amusing. Have a nice day!

By P.S.