All You Agile Belong to Us...

04/26/2006

OK, in the “joy of mechanical translations” department, I read the following glowing review of Practices of an Agile Developer, not in the original French, but as mis-rendered by Google’s translation algorithms:

Nimble Practices of year Developer (and here’s the Google translation, sort of)

Ya gotta love it. Of course, this follows in a rich tradition of mis-translations, from the innocent “Corpses by Fisher” on the GM cars (should have been “Bodies”) to the “Got Milk?” campaign rendered as, “Are You Lactating?” and of course the famous (if somewhat aprocryphal) “Coca Cola” translated to “Bite The Wax Tadpole”.

I have to wonder what the Chinese ideogram for “wax tadpole” might be, and why they’d even have such a thing :) Seriously, the fact that this sort of this works at all is truly miraculous.

Either way, a lot of these fine folks in other areas of the world are translating our books. We’re now available in a variety of Asian and European languages.

Being a monolinguistic sort myself, I can only trust that they did a better job than Google :-)