>>>Yes I saw some funny stories about those translations. Thanks for the info. A
>>happy new year to you and your family Hilmar!
>>
>>One that is interesting - apparently true - is about a German city that published a touristic brochure. To save the cost of a professional translator, they used a free automatic translation service. The translation was virtually useless, and they had to redo it, this time, with a human translator...
>
>In my city they had to replace the human translator with a human translator :)

Ah, yes, that can happen too.

Here is one of my favorite translations: I remember a television program, on Astronomy, which talked about "Sirius B" (Sirius is a double star; the two components are called "Sirius A" and "Sirius B"; Sirius B is especially interesting, since it is the first white dwarf discovered).

Now, the translator had apparently only heard the English program, and not seen it in written, and understood "serious bee". In English, the two things sound very similar, but in Spanish, they definitely don't. I kept wondering why I hadn't ever heard about a star with such a strange name, until mention was made of a period of 50 years. This put me on the right track.

Obviously, the translator didn't know the topic very well in this case.