Sunday 11 May 2008

Holy shit

My sister normally reads these posts from work, but she had a surprise last week. The server her workplace uses wouldn't let her open the blog. When she told me about it a couple of days ago I thought she was going to say it had been blocked for obscenity (read: Berlusconi's todger). But I was wrong. My crime, which renders me unreadable for a large public organization in London, is profanity. I may express the occasional doubt about the role of various churches in issues that don't concern them, but profane? Surely that's rather harsh. I also wonder how they know. They obviously have much more sensitive filters than those used by GoogleAds, which also picks up on the religious content of the blog, but seems to think my readers are either devout catholics (which may sometimes be the case) or waiting for the Rapture (which I devoutly hope, isn't.)

And if you're wondering why I've been inactive these past few days, let me show you a sample of the 40-page text I'm supposed to be editing for a certain unnamed international agency:
"The farmers organization without the money", that falls the farmers are to be an only the beneficiary of the grant aid, that is free of charge, by the government and/or donors with passiveness, no ideas against the trouble shooting, and they are just like only being gathering group. How extent of the grant aid could help the poor farmer's hope? When considering the disturbance of the "free of charge" programme which being spoiled the farmer's self-help efforts, it was really necessary to discover the right direction for the International Cooperation that will not be a "free of charge".
As Sophie Tucker once said about a TV healer: "Honey, he can heal the sick, but he can't raise the dead."

5 comments:

Ms Baroque said...

Go on! You can do it! Bloody hell though, you've just made MY job look a lot eaier.

Ms Baroque said...

Or indeed easier. I'd have SO picked that typo up in a document.

Charles Lambert said...

I'm not sure I would. Not any more. I'm punch drunk...

Unknown said...

Well, that international organization (no idea which one it could be ..) certainly makes you earn your money. That text looks like the output of an automatic translation. Maybe if you feed it back into the computer program ..? Come to think of it, being punch drunk might help getting the job done, too.

Charles Lambert said...

I think it's just written by someone whose English is dreadful; not even a translation program could be that bad...