From a recent article on Heise, very cleverly translated by Google:
“The driving - and above all financing - strength behind Ubuntu is Mark of Shuttleworth, which a name as a space tourist on EAT YOURSELF made.”
I can assure Heise readers that Mark has better taste than to be an autophagist. Well, marginally better taste. But hey, if Heise reckons it’ll pay, I’ll give it a run. <homer>Mmm, me.</homer>
6 Comments
never trust machine translations:
google seems to mistranslate “”“der sich einen Namen als Weltraumtourist auf der ISS machte.”“” to “”“which a name as a space tourist on EAT YOURSELF made.—”
ISS is certainly something different than EAT YOURSELF
What a funny translation!
A slightly more correct version of the above would be:
“The driving - and above all financing - force behind Ubuntu is Mark Shuttleworth, who made himself a name as a space tourist on the ISS.”
eat yourself … muhahaha!
Well, the translation is incorrect. The original German statement was:
“Die treibende - und vor allem finanzierende - Kraft hinter Ubuntu ist Mark Shuttleworth, der sich einen Namen als Weltraumtourist auf der ISS machte.”
What you should know is that “ISS” (International Space Station) in lower case is “iss” which is the past form of the verb essen (to eat). Thus, the translation tool you have used, translated ISS to EAT!
A better translation (I am not German, so might not be the best):
“The driving - and above all financing - force behind Ubuntu is Mark Shuttleworth, who became famous as a space-tourist in the ISS.”
Jean-Christophe
FYI (SCNR):
@Jean-Christophe:
Actually, ‘iss’ is not in any way associated with a past tense. It is the imperative of the second person singular, like “Eat!” in English or “Mange!” in French. German past forms of ‘essen’ are:
- aß (Imperfekt)
- hat gegessen (Perfekt)
- hatte gegessen (Plusquamperfekt)
and probably - as it’s German - about a 100 different forms and tenses more ;-).
Anyway, I can’t imagine any case where the google translation would be right, since ‘Eat yourself’ would translate to ‘Iss dich selbst’.
There are some bugs in google’s german grammar engine and this is one of them. It believes that the reflexive pronoun ‘sich’ belongs to the imperative ‘iss!’ (‘eat!’), but ‘sich’ with an imperative doesn’t make sense in german (‘eat yourself!’ would be ‘iss dich [selbst]!’, ‘to eat oneself’ would be ‘sich [selber] essen’ and ‘he eats himself’ would be ‘er isst sich [selbst]’).
In this sentence ‘sich’ belongs to ‘machte’ (‘made’). ‘sich einen Namen machen’ means ‘to make a name for oneself’ (‘to become famous’).
Just in case you want the full inflection to be really thoroughly informed:
http://www.canoo.net/services/Controller?dispatch=inflection&input=essen&features=(Cat+V)&lang=en
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Ubuntu Planet that is. Mark Shuttleworth apparently made his money fromself digestion, and not from killing every other GNU/Linux distro or by eating babies. Solve a bug, get a hug? Wonders will never cease. Just when you thought you got the latest buzzword sorted out, comes a new
March 17, 2006 03:18 PM