As a german I’m used to strange translations in computer context.
I saw it back when I was using Microsoft products and I regulary stumble upon it on Debian systems. But whats actually kind of funny:Debian is outstanding in that regard.
An example:
Debian has that „wonderful“ package manpages-de which provides a german manpage for ps.
It contains a formulation that is so inaccurate and not really funny:
„–cumulative Daten von toten Kindern einbeziehen (als Summe zusammen mit den Eltern)“
For the English only speakers: That can be roughly translated to „Collect data from dead children
(summed with their parents)“. For me this somehow sounds like we are a butcher OS and so I reported #495441 but nobody cared about it yet.
Today I had another WTF on german translations because when I wanted to upgrade my system I read the following sentence:
„Sind Sie sich sicher, dass Sie die oben genannten Pakete installieren bzw. aufrüsten wollen?“
Cold war, anyone?
Well its a classical case of using a word-by-word translation instead of a meaning-orientied translation. Its a fact that ‚upgrade‘ can be translated to ‚aufrüsten‘ (as done above) but in that case its just not appropriate. As a matter of fact most german people I’m aware of would actually confuse the meaning with a meaning such as in a military context (therefore the „Cold war, anyone?“ text above). And just btw. if we would rely on computing power to translate it back into English we would get:
Are you sure itself that you want to install and/or rig the packages specified above?
So it seems that Babelfish has a similar pereception.
