It could be the start of a bad joke: “Do you know the one about the Jewish journalist who used free online MT to translate an e-mail to a Dutch diplomat and almost caused an international incident?”

Stories of bad translations done by computers abound, but seldom do they make the news like the recent embarrassing situation caused by a delegation of Israeli journalists who were going to Amsterdam next week for an educational seminar on the Dutch political system.

Thus began the machine-translated message : “Helloh bud, Enclosed five of the questions in honor of the foreign minister: The mother your visit in Israel is a sleep to the favor or to the bed your mind on the conflict are Israeli Palestinian, and on relational Israel Holland.” The journalists also inquired “What in your opinion needs to do opposite the awful the Iranian of Israel?” Apparently the translation tool used confused ha’im, the Hebrew word for if, with ha’ima, which means mother.

The Jerusalem Post claims that the journalists used the popular translation engine Babelfish, but this appears to be incorrect. Babelfish (which uses Systran’s rules-based translation engine) doesn’t handle Hebrew. One source indicates that they may have used Babylon.

Even though the press hailed this story as a diplomatic incident, we prefer to file this story under the humorous incident category, with no major consequences to anybody except the journalist who couldn’t spend a few shekels to have the questionnaire translated professionally.

Machine translation made the news last week when Google decided to drop Systran’s translation engine in favor of its own statistical based system, with visible improvements. The message from Common Sense Advisory stays the same: There is a place and a time for machine translation as a possible alternative to what we call ZT (zero translation). Whether you are a buyer of translation services, an LSP, or an individual translator, MT should be part of your language strategy.