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Japanese translators

I love the nonsensical English that appears when you put Japanese into an online translator.

I just received the following email in Japanese, after ordering a dehumidifier cabinet from an electronics store.

商品が入荷次第、お届けの手配をさせていただきます。 今しばらくお待ちいただけますようお願いいたします。

And the translation…

The commodity arrival circumstance, can point to the arrangement which is the delivery. Now for a while to wait, it can receive, the fish we ask.

I presume there has been a delay with my order. I wonder which fish they are going to ask.

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Travel writer and photographer living in Okinawa, Japan

4 Comments

  1. ^_^ Was this Google translate by any chance? In my experience it’s by far the least accurate for Japanese-English of the available translators. Makes sense considering how it works of course.

    How it managed to make “うお” into a separate word instead of seeing it as “よう お願い” is pretty hard to understand no matter which translator it was though.

    • It’s Systran. I think it is the standard translator on the Dashboard for Macs. I have a feeling they use these translators to create the slogans for T-shirts in Japan.

  2. Koi no bori… they’ll be throwing in a free carp with the dehumidifier or something!

  3. haha, and sometimes my university students use these translation apps to write their essays – I know as soon as I see it they’ve done it on computer, because it’s total gibberish with lots of irrelevant ‘a’s, ‘the’s and ‘one’s. Pseudo sample:

    “The sister is pleased with oneself for hard times.”

    These students get a fail.

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