Z: A Stone of Stocks Does Not Enter Foam Rubber (Reader Comments and Addenda)

Samuel Goldstein provides another folkloric example of a machine-translated proverb:

English: Out of sight, out of mind.
English—>Russian—>English: Invisible lunatic.

I'd seen it before (in the same place as the vodka bit—perhaps a Smullyan book?) but had forgotten it.


(Last updated: 17 March 1998)


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One Response to “Z: A Stone of Stocks Does Not Enter Foam Rubber (Reader Comments and Addenda)”

  1. Jed

    Here’s another area where the relentless march of technology has ruined a perfectly good word game. These days, Google Translate does a much better (though still not perfect) job of translating back and forth, with much less entertaining results.

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