Over the last decade of so, the University of Not-Bielefeld has increasingly targeted international students in a bid to become a more global player on the university scene. One “crucial” step in this direction over the past two years or so is having e-mails from central admin (including the President’s Office) in two languages: German and what DeepL assures admin is the English translation of it.
The problem here is that admin types tend not to be bilingual, at least not with English as the second language, so they just run with the translation without checking it. There are, of course, some interesting constructions that DeepL thinks up for itself, but it generally does a good job. However, there are also some obvious, additional, non-DeepL typos that a quick proofread would catch.
For instance, thanks to corona, we supervisors now have the option to register all the Bachelor and Master theses for our students online. (Not really online online in the form of a form, but just e-mailing the form to the Examination Office, probably because they still have to print it out on their end. But, hey, it’s still a step up towards the modern world.) The confirmation-form-e-mail (remove one hyphen around “form” as you see fit), for which someone on their end has to type in the relevant details (so hush hush on the webform before they realize that it shoves even more of their work our way, k?), starts off great in German, not so great in English:
German: Sehr geehrter Herr fogBlogger,
English: Dearfogblogger,
We’ll forget about Sehr geehrter translating out literally as “most honoured” because no one outside of a spam mail would say that in English (so plus points to DeepL), but somehow not only my gender but also a fairly important piece of punctuation has been lost in translation. And this for months now without anyone noticing (or in my case complaining).
Ah yes, bonehead confirmation of the day it seems …
The Blog About Fog 