Hey Google, translate this!

A satire

Originally published on March 8, 2020.

By Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs* (aka Great and All-Powerful Head of Google Translate)

Due to the recent viral outbreak in garbage language in the workplace, we at Google Translate have upgraded and improved our system to help you make sense of all this nonsense.

Soon, we will be introducing Real English to Google Translate. It will help translate all that technical jargony, hipster, acronyms-on-steroids gobbledygook into Real English.

Google Translate, for the three people left in the world who are unfamiliar with us or even with Google — I know, I laughed out loud myself when I wrote the latter part — is a statistical machine translation system that’s state-of-the-art. It uses a rule-based approach that needs the work of linguists to define vocabularies and grammars.

At least that’s what my tech team called it when we first went “live” with Google Translate in 2006. In plain English, it’s a way to translate words in other languages using computers and other fancy stuff and putting it in a language you can understand.

Until now, Google Translate’s been working pretty well. We translate words in more than 100 languages but one of them wasn’t Garbage Language. That’s the phrase that writers like Molly Young, in Vulture magazine, and Uncanny Valley author Anna Wiener use to describe this mad phenomenon swirling around our boardroom tables and infecting our emails and conference calls.

Garbage language is simply that: the kind of talk that company people especially like to use. It’s everywhere, including probably your own workplace.

It’s become an epidemic. We needed to do something to stop it.

And here’s a funny irony. In our own company, we had people and lots and lots of resources earmarked to come up with a cure for coronavirus — we are Google after all, and our mission is to save the world — but we had to pull our people off their tasks to create a new translation program for Garbage Language. Soon, you will see it as one option in the top search bar of Google Translate when you go to look up a word or phrase and translate to Real English.

Let me show you how it will work.

Here is a recent commentary in The Georgia Straight magazine from Dave Demers, plantsman (Google Translate=gardener) and an official on the Vancouver Parks Board:

“I here contend that we need an overarching modus operandi that would allow us to scale up and facilitate long-term management…It is important to move the dial of our expectations somewhere between traditional horticulture and conventional rewilding, onto the sweet but elusive spot where greater sustainability, maximum ecological output, and generalized public adoption all overlap.”

Translated, what he’s saying is this:

“I’m a pompous ass being given space in Canada’s largest urban weekly to spew out verbal diarrhea — which would probably be great for our parks and gardens come to think of it!I really don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about, nevermind what ‘overarching modus operandi’ and ‘rewilding’ mean, but I remember seeing them on a corporate memo once so I want to make myself look smart. See, the editors at The Georgia Straight asked me to write about 1,500 words which is an awful lot. My first draft was 150 words, so I had to pad it a bit.”

See what I mean?

Here’s a shorter example. It comes from Gwendoloena Merlini of Postmortem, the official publication of the Canadian Embalmers Association. She wrote this in a memo to the remaining five people left on the publication’s payroll:

“DevOps has a rollback strategy in the unlikely case we’ll need it.”

She was writing about a plan B strategy for a new initiative Postmortem was launching. What she meant was,

“I gotta use military metaphors here to tell you how we’re gonna walk back this latest shit-show. I wrote it won’t be needed but, trust me, it will. This shit-show is guaranteed to fail.”

So there you have it: Google Translate for Garbage Language into Real English. Sorry, but it doesn’t work the other way around.

Look for it soon and be sure to download Google Translate on your computer or mobile device. It’s available as an extension on Google Chrome or as an app.

Google Translate is easy to download, fun to use and will unbefuddle (or should that be fuddle?)— as one commentator to The Georgia Straight put it — the“pompous propensity to propogate obfuscation” in Garbage Language today.

This is a guarantee from Google.

Sincerely,

Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs* (aka Great and All-Powerful Head of Google Translate)

*with acknowledgement to the genius of L. Frank Baum

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Editor’s Note: This is a piece of satire. Some of the names of the people have been changed but not the plantsman Dave Demers. Oh, he’s very real. All the Garbage Language quoted, alas, is also very real and verbatim.