The roads I take...

In a discussion about automatic translation we just had in #seamonkey, I got reminded once again of the good old "talking moon" story, which is always good for a laugh.

We all know that automatic translation services don't work perfectly, but e.g. translate.google.com does a good job in many cases and you can figure out what the original text was talking about, even if you don't understand the language it was written in.

Back in 2002, mozillaZine had a story about a German magazine polling their readers about their favorite browser. Of course, the magazine wrote its original story in their language, which was German, so mozillaZine linked to the rough translation of that Google service.
The mostly English-speaking Mozilla community was quite glad about this, and people could easily figure out through this translation what the results of that poll were. But, reading one sentence there made some people wonder what it means: "The Browser from talking moon is further unquestioned on place one, ...". Now how is a talking moon related to browsers? Looking into the original article revealed what had happended: "Zwar liegt der Browser aus Redmond weiterhin unangefochten auf Platz eins, ..." - "Redmond" had been translated to "talking moon"! Well, "red-" as a prefix derived from the verb "reden" - "to talk", can surely be translated to "talking", and "Mond" is the "moon", that's also correct. Just the algorithm detecting "Redmond" as a German word was probably a bit wrong, I guess

Who would have thought that there's a talking moon right in the vicinity of Seattle?