Mistranslation.com explains why, at the rate linguistic technology is developing, a Star-Trek-esque universal translator is still quite far away.

Font geek humor at its finest: Behind The Typeface. This may be one of the most amusing and well-executed Flash parodies I’ve seen in a good while… but then again, it doesn’t help that, as I’ve mentioned before, I myself am a fontaholic…

OK, I just stumbled across this page, and what it showcases may be one of the most hilarious bits of Engrish I’ve seen in a good while: Intertllr Terininatdr. [Link updated 2004-11-23 now that AnimeJump has restored the bootleg toys to their site…]

And while we’re on the subject of bad translations, here are a few more I stumbled across through Google:

• When foreign text goes ‘Engrish’
• King of Maracas Insteruction [link updated 2004-11-23]
• Tom: Strange Stuff

Y’know, someone should create a new Unix compression utility named feather, so named because it would make bulky files as light as a feather. That way, you could compress a collection of files by tarring and feathering them…

Here’s why it helps to know a second language, as witnessed by the Zone38 server logs (hey, they never lie!):

A user of Google’s Brazilian site performed a search for Dowload of the game Super Mario. One of the links on the resulting page was to a blog entry on Zone38 which mentioned various “dowload” searches and linked to the Proofreader’s Hall of Shame, the site to which all those searches had led.

Apparently thinking that site was some sort of page on video game emulation, this unlucky Brazilian subsequently followed the link and typed “super mario” into the PHS’ internal search.

Needless to say, he gave up after a short while…

The Chronicles of George, for those who’ve never heard of the site, are a collection of actual tech support tickets recorded by one incredibly inept employee over a span of several months. How inept, you ask? Well…for one thing, despite the fact that he’s a native English speaker, he is often “havening” problems writing intelligibly…

What would happen if the Queen of England visited a chat room? Well, we’ll never really know, but one of Eric D. Snider’s columns gives a pretty believable depiction…

Here’s the text, verbatim, from a spam e-mail I just got:

Dear asutt13 ,

Hi,

Would you like to be able to count on your celphone
Increase signal strenth
Less static
Inexpensive booster antenna
Easy to install

<mutters at spammers for being so stupid>

“I was writing ‘paper, on the PC, and it was like BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP!” Let’s just be glad that, judging from the e-mail excerpt also featured on Apple’s site, this particular user writes much better than she speaks…

Interesting link spotted on Metafilter: the Language Museum. Samples of pretty much every language you can think of, along with an English translation…