Friday, August 8, 2008

Ineffective Error Messages


This quickly-becoming-famous image is apparently from a restaurant in China. Some people seem to think it's photoshopped--they claim the "l" in "Translate" isn't behind the steel girder, but I'm not so sure that what they're assuming is the top part of the "l" isn't just a shadow within the girder (other portions of that bottom bar have similar shadows).

In any case, it looks like whatever translation software was used (the Chinese characters apparently say "restaurant" or "cafeteria") produced an error message which the user mistook as the translation. If you're going to have translation software, one would think you'd take care to provide error messages in both the "to" (English) and "from" (Chinese) languages.

For the record, here's what Google Translate says:

  • 餐厅 = restaurant
  • 翻译服务器错误 = translation server error

Via Hit & Run.

Image from here.

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