[B1FIDO]

Once, back around 2011 or 2012, I was using Google Translate for a speech I was to deliver in church. It was shorter than one page printed out.

I only needed the Spanish translation. Now I am proficient in spoken and written Spanish, and I can perfectly understand what is said, and yet I still ran the English through Google Translate and printed it out without really checking through it.

I got to the podium and there was a line where I said "electricity is in the air" (a metaphor, obviously) and the Spanish translation said "electricidad no está en el aire" and I was able to correct that on-the-fly, but I was pissed at Translate, and I badmouthed it for months. And sure, it was my fault for not proofing and vetting the entire output, but come on!

[aidenn0]

Similar timeframe, I used it for translating some German into English. I'm a native English speaker who has spent some time in Germany (but had not spoken any German in over a decade at this point) and quickly noticed some things were off. After reviewing the original text I realized that every single separable verb[1] that was not in infinitive form was mistranslated. This is an astoundingly bad systematic error for a machine translation program to have.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separable_verb