Interesting functionalities
Admittedly the number of people who will find the following funny, or of any interest at all, is pretty limited, so it is a good bet that about 99.86% of the faithful readers of this blog can safely wait for the next post. To appreciate the present one you must be a French-speaking nerd with an interest in both Pushkin’s poetry and Bayesian language translation. Worse, you must have a sense of the comic that somehow matches mine. (Then let’s make that 99.98%.)
Anyway, if you are still with me: there is a famous Pushkin love poem entitled Я помню чудное мгновенье…: “I remember the magic moment…” (the moment when he first saw her). I have no idea why I fed it into Google Translate; sheer idleness I suppose. In the line
И снились милые черты
the poet states that the delicate features of his beloved came to him in his sleep. Literally: “And [your] gentle [face’s] features came to my dreams”.
Google renders this into French as “Et rêvé de fonctionnalités intéressantes”: And dreamed of interesting functionalities. (The direct translation to English is less fun.)
Kudos to Google for capturing the subtle mood of 21st-century passion. When the true nerd — I know what I am talking about — feels romantic, falls asleep, and starts dreaming, we now know what he dreams of: interesting functionalities.
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