Why Google Translate needs to be taken with a korn of salt

"Fire f**ked by boys"

That's the banner headline at the top of Svalbardposten's Web site if you use Google Translate (with real letters replacing the asterisks, of course). It's also why one of the first changes made to the Icepeople site was disabling the Google Translate link to Svalbardposten's articles. Editor Birger Amundsen was concerned - rightly so - about it making his paper look silly or worse.

Running lists of mistranslations can be fun, in sort of a Chinese-menu-into-English way, and I'll do so from time to time. But errors like this are also why I'll post warnings about what you read when links to other foreign sites are posted. I do it so people can decipher general meanings from articles - and sometimes they're so garbled I don't bother - but to expect more is lunacy.

Interestingly, the title bar for that particular page says the fire was "banged" by the boys. The original Norwegian word is "påsatt," which according to my dictionary means "incendiary" or "intentional." I've looked up various crude forms of "copulate" and nothing comes close to "påsatt."

But, hey, it puts me one step closer to being able to swear effectively in the language of my new homeland. So it wasn't a total loss.