Lost in Translation

I don’t make enough (translation: any) money from writing and blogging (translation: self-publishing word salads) because of my frugal readers & followers (translation: deadbeats), so I actually have a day job running my own business as I have for 14 years (translation: too long) now. I have a close (translation: ethically suspect) relationship with a number of customers and vendors (translation: potential criminal co-conspirators) that often leads me to agree to handle some challenging (translation: stupid) tasks. One such task is to curate and mange (translation: mostly ignore) the YouTube channel of one vendor. I was surprised to get a notification of this comment in regard to a video for a therapeutic massage machine.

I wasn’t sure if Lhtutuutfirh was covfefe level gibberish (translation: most of what Trump says), or if this was a customer asking to place a million dollar order. To the Google Translate machine!

This was the first result I got.

Hmm, that’s not much help. The customer’s name of Jithu Kokken sounded Finnish, not Estonian, to me, so I tried translating from Finnish.

Again, not much of a translation, but I tried the suggested phrase in Estonian.

I was starting to think Google Translate was just having some fun with me. But there was the suggestion to translate from Arabic, so what did I have to lose?

Jackpot! Looks like there will be no million dollar order, and just a wiseguy Finn/Estonian/Arab. I’m not sure how to reply to that comment. Maybe “Covfefe” will suffice.

If you can’t get enough of my award-winning (translation: 5th place, which is good enough for my readers) writings, click this link to buy my book of short stories.