Saturday, October 25, 2014

The worst yet?

OMG Bing this is maybe your worst yet.

Навстречу переводу стрелок на час назад
To transfer the shooter on an hour ago


Gazeta is reminding Russians of the approach of "winter time" - that is, when the hands of the clock are put back an hour. Not when the shooter is transferred an hour ago. Sheesh.

I don't even know how they got "to transfer the shooter" from "Навстречу переводу стрелок", I really don't. Навстречу is literally "to the meeting" and means "to approach, to go to meet, to meet halfway." And though перевод does mean transfer, or translation, or a lot of other things, it's not a verb, it's a noun. And стрелок is a shooter, but that's the nominative form and here what we have is the genitive plural of стрелка, which is "arrow" or "pointer" or in the plural "clock hands". Bing has completely ignored all the grammar in the phrase (to the meeting of the transfer of the hands).  I mean, if it was "transfer the shooter"  it would be перевод (or more likely переводить) стрелка, not переводу стрелок. And the grammar of на час назад, too. That's not "on an hour", which would be locative case; it's "by an hour" in the accusative, and the на makes it impossible for it to mean "an hour ago" - it has to be "an hour back(wards)".

This is just unbelievably bad.

Not that Google is any better: "Towards translation shooter hour ago". It knows навстречу, unlike Bing, but it picks a different wrong word for переводу and makes the same unforgivable grammar errors with "переводу стрелок", resulting in the same case and number error ("shooter" instead of "hands") as Bing's. "Hour ago" is bad English, and it ignores the на, too.

This isn't even hard Russian!

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