God knows I could use some cash right now, but this Award Winning Notification sure won’t help me. It’s a scam, and it is probably sent out to at least the 25,000 e-mail addresses mentioned in the mail.

The really sad part about this mail is that this was sent to my pong email address, an address that isn’t even coded as a mailto anywhere. They simply picked it up from plain text. So, the so-called `advanced automated random computer search´ is most probably one of those rouge spiders hammering my site.

Well, well. Here goes. If you received one of these. Take it for what it is. A piece of junk mail trying to get you to pay a registration fee and a delivery fee for a non existant lottery winning from a lottery that never existed.

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Automatic translation tools are just not trustworthy. I’ve said it before many times, and written several pages about it in Swedish under Översättning (Translation).

However, if you just want to have a bit of fun on Google Translate’s expence. Try to do this little funny practice.

Go to Google Translate. Type the following line into the translate text box:

my mom is nice and cool

Select English to Spanish from the dropdown menu.
Click the Translate button.

The text translates into the Spanish sentense

mi mama está agradable y fresca

This looks fine to me, although I did have very poor grades in Spanish. However, Google Translate missed at least one acute accent: mama should have been [fet:mamá]. This will prove to be a crucial error, when we take the translated sentence back to English.

Now, copy the Spanish text and paste it into the Translate text box.
Select Spanish to English and again, click the Translate button.

The result is quite surprising actually:

my breast is pleasant and fresh

WTF? How could “my mom is nice and cool” translate into “my breast is pleasant and fresh”!?!?!? It’s not only the missed accent that turned mom into breast. It’s all about meaning, that a machine just cannot translate.

So don’t come and tell me that automated transation tools are usable.

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