Saturday, December 15, 2018
Why Google wins
Bolsonaro wrote just now:
Abrimos mão de sediar a Conferência Climática Mundial da ONU pois custaria mais de R$500 milhões ao Brasil e seria realizada em breve, o que poderia constranger o futuro governo a adotar posições que requerem um tempo maior de análise e estudo. O Estadão esnoba o bom jornalismo.
My crude semi-translation scared me. It looked like he was saying We opened our hand to the Climate Conference... which would be a complete turnaround from his previous CORRECT position. Is he already joining Satan?
Bing's translator agreed with my crudeness:
We have opened the way to host the UN World Climate conference ...
In desperation I tried Google's translator:
We did not host the UN World Climate Conference ...
To settle the issue I looked up "Portuguese idiom abrir mão", and found that abrir mão generally means 'give up' or 'surrender'. So the sentence is something like We abandoned the opportunity to host the UN etc.
Opening your hand to let go of the object, not welcoming with open hands.
In translation as in searching, Google's algorithms win hands down. Or hands open. Like it or not, Google has achieved a natural monopoly, a deserved monopoly, in these two areas.
Labels: Carbon Cult, Language update
¶ 7:15 AM
