Tower of Babble

The observant among you may have noticed my little 'translator' on the side of the page. At the quick press of a flag, my blog is instantly translated into several languages. Cool.

I added it on to the page in the hopes of translating the site into Japanese. My friends and family in Japan could read what I wrote and be a part of my blogging experience. The first time I clicked on the Japanese flag and my words came up in Japanese, I was thoroughly impressed. It would take me ages to translate one of my own posts. My Japanese is not all that good. This was done in a matter of seconds. Very cool.

Then I started reading the translation. Ummmmmmm, not cool. English to Japanese or vice versa is notoriously hard to translate. Grammatics, word order, colloquial expressions, well, basically everything is completely different in the two languages. Computer translations have been very unsuccessful for this very reason. Apparently, they still are unsuccessful -- at least, the free download-off-the-Internet-types are anyway.

For example, my intro:

I am two 29-year-old mother. I am America. My husband is the Norwegian language. Yada. Yada. I speak one language and two other broken fluently. I have a riddle for your benefit: my mother is the Japanese language, my father is an American, my kids are the Norwegian language, so what does that make me?

You get the picture. The widget is aptly named Babel Fish.

My mother told me to take the tool down immediately as it makes me sound like a tool and a raving lunatic in Japanese.

Raving lunatic is not the image I was trying to send across the language barrier.