Gawker: valleywag, lost in translation

Israeli politican: Yes, we can copy your website

Owen Thomas — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:00:00 EST

The campaign site for Binyamin "Bibi" Netanyahu," the Israeli candidate for prime minister, is a mirror-image copy of BarackObama.com, flopped to accommodate the right-to-left Hebrew script. Right down to the icons, it mirrors the website developed by Blue State Digital, reports the New York Times. The new-media touches may not all translate; Israel only has a couple thousand Twitter users, making it an unlikely get-out-the-vote mechanism. The imitation is meant as flattery: Netanyahu and Obama have met twice and are said to get along, and the Israeli candidate is campaigning on a similar theme of change.

Apple France on MacBook launch: "Perfectly idiotic"

Owen Thomas — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Vive la résistance! We don't know if Apple France intentionally tweaked their American overlords, or just screwed up. But for a while, Apple's French website described the newly launched MacBooks as "parfaitement con," for which a very polite translation is "perfectly idiotic." The page now reads "parfaitement conçu," or "perfectly conceived." If you thought Apple was all about obsessive attention to detail, be aware that product promise only applies to English-language material.

Mark Zuckerberg puts Sheryl Sandberg in her place

Owen Thomas — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 15:20:00 EDT

Want to know the ultimate putdown in Silicon Valley? Calling someone a "good manager." Organizational competence is a necessary commodity; risk-takers, entrepreneurs, "visionaries" are the ones who get the glory, the press, and the outsized financial returns. With that in mind, read this excerpt from an interview Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg conducted with the Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung, Germany's leading business newspaper, as an exercise in damning with faint praise:

FAZ: Can you please describe your cooperation with Sheryl Sandberg?
Mark Zuckerberg: She is an excellent manager. She is very good in building our international organization. I'm focused on the direction of the company, especially of the product development, and the overall strategy. I spend a lot of time working with engineers and product developers. We work together hand in hand.

FAZ: Who is the boss?
Mark Zuckerberg: Me!

That should make things clear — to Sandberg, most of all. Charitably, Silicon Alley Insider wonders if something was lost in translation. Nah. Zuckerberg is this blunt and awkward in English, too.

(Photo by Christian Thiel/FAZ)

Yahoo's failure even funnier in French

Owen Thomas — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 15:20:00 EDT

I just got a copy of an article in Capital, France's biggest business magazine, which neatly summarizes the history of Yahoo's troubles. The best part? Seeing the "Peanut Butter memo" — executive Brad Garlinghouse's cri de coeur about Yahoo's all-over-the-map strategy — translated into French:

Notre stratégie est comme une tartine de
beurre de cacahuète.

Put that way, it almost sounds poetic.

The reward for translating Facebook into Spanish

Nicholas Carlson — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 19:20:57 EST

OK, we were wrong. The 1,500 volunteers who translated Facebook from English into Spanish in just four weeks were rewarded with more than just the "impact of their contribution." They got this gift from billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Click to expand the image. And your jealousy.

Mark Zuckerberg convinces 1,500 Spanish speakers to paint his fence

Nicholas Carlson — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 12:40:54 EST

In just four weeks, 1,500 Spanish-speaking Facebook users translated the entire site, which will appear in Spanish to all users from Spanish-speaking countries starting February 11. Right now, that's about 2.8 million active users in Latin America and Spain. What did these users get for all their hard work?

Recognition from their peers. They were "motivated by the impact of their contribution," gloated Zuckerberg through his PR team. One sucker actually translated 1,284 sentences — about 3 percent of the site. I'd tell you more — like about how the news threatens the dominance of Google's Orkut in South America — but, well, I'm sure you're "motivated" enough "by the impact" you'd make by doing that yourself. I'm off the swimming hole.

"Webgemeinde baffles" at Googler wedding

Owen Thomas — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 19:58:01 EST

Back when we had party correspondent Megan McCarthy to kick around, I made a point of assigning her all interviews with the German press. But now Leggy's headed to Wired, so when Der Spiegel called to interview me about Larry and Lucy's wedding, I had to handle it myself. And I think I acquitted myself pretty well. I think. The Google translation was a little unclear. "Webgemeinde baffles," indeed. Larry, when you get back, could you get someone working on this?

Google dumped Systran's translation system...

Nicholas Carlson — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 15:04:13 EDT

Google dumped Systran's translation system for its own. 是否有人照顾? [Google Operating System]

Rest of world enjoys social networks, running water, electricity

Jordan Golson — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 18:27:42 EDT

Apparently, overseas, there are social networks other than Facebook and MySpace. Who knew? Read/WriteWeb mentions that social net Hi5 which tallies 35 million uniques per month according to ComScore, making it competitive with Facebook. And yet the name will draw blank stares at a Silicon Valley tech meetup. Like Google's Orkut, Hi5 is huge overseas and virtually nonexistent in the U.S. Hi5 even launched a developer API in August, but got scant coverage from the Web 2.0 crowd. The bias, of course, is partly driven by economics. Tapping overseas advertisers is tough, and so developers planning to build ad-supported websites and applications naturally turn to U.S. markets. But media myopia is a factor, too. Until magazine editors' teenage daughters start using it, Hi5 is likely to remain invisible.

Facebook might be stronger in a handful...

Jordan Golson — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 17:30:50 EDT

Facebook might be stronger in a handful of countries than MySpace, but not strong enough for their liking. The company is in the process of translating their entire site into a number of non-English languages. How do you say "poke" in Arabic? [Financial Times]

"Hulu," the name for NBC Universal and News...

Owen Thomas — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 23:35:21 EDT

"Hulu," the name for NBC Universal and News Corp.'s new online-video site, means "butt" in Bahasa Indonesia, the language spoken in the southeast Asian archipelago. [Webster's Online Dictionary]