Have you ever wanted to learn a new language?
Why would you ever want to do that?
Could it be to gain access to new ways acquiring scientific knowledge, for instance?
Euronews, an European news TV channel, has a multi-language approach to news broadcasting. It provides news in many different languages! Specifically, it provides the SAME news in different languages.. Or at least one would expect them to be the same!..
Hmm, Who do they translate the science spots? Could they be automatically translated using any famed automatic translation tool available online?
If you can understand Portuguese, I invite you to take a look at the following science spot from Euronews, "Origins of our galaxy", in Portuguese, and compare it to the same one in English.
The first obvious difference is the title, which translates from "origins of our galaxy" to "técnica fotográfica ajuda a estudar estrelas". But that is acceptable; it's like changing from "origins of our galaxy" to "photographic technique helps studying stars".
The nonsense starts revealing it self on seconds 00:26 of the video when the Portuguese version talks about the "Milky Way constellation"!.. We know a constellation is sort of an "official" asterism, that presents an easy to find figure on the sky to facilitate searching for a given "place" up there. A constellation is not a galaxy.
The next piece of video nonsense comes at 2:24, where a scientific acronym gets translated. In the video, MAD, or Multi-conjugate Adaptive optics Demonstrator, is turned into "Multi-Conjugação Adaptativa e Demonstradora Adaptável do Sistema Óptico"! Which I can re-translate to english so you (might) understand: "Adaptive Multi-conjugation and Adaptable Demonstrator of the Optical system". I would love to see how this gets translated to Portuguese again!
Anyway, the most serious part is still to come. The Portuguese video mentions the VLT to "use an infra-red system"! Ooooo! It's almost like one of those mysterious black boxes that are stored next to the telescope mount, just 2 meters away from the instruments' power supply unit.. A special IR-system that changes light, making it a superb source of scientific information!... Well... The English video simply says that VLT is meant to "observe light in the Infra-Red", which is either a slightly, or just a totally different thing! It spoils all the magic that a super-secret I.R. System box could spell onto the observation data...
Oh well, I still wish I had one of those Multi-Optical Adaptational Conjugal Demonstrator Systems... Or was it a Multi-Adaptable Optics Adaptation System Demonstration Thing?...
