I love the online translator sites like the one at dictionary.com because it’s fun to sometimes find out what someone is saying or has posted online.  It can also be amusing to use when you want to “mix it up” a little bit and make it seems as though you were bi/trilingual.  Of course, there are not many opportunities to use an English-to-Mandarin translation but it’s still fun to make people wonder what the hell you just typed.

Sometimes the fun and games can backfire on you in humorous ways.  A friend had a party that he sent Evites for and I replied as a “Yes” with the following comment in Spanish - "Sí, ésos son tiradores en mis pantalones y me plazco verle."  This was the interpretation that dictionary.com gave me for the phrase “Yes, that IS a shooter in my pants and I AM happy to see you.”  (“Shooter” meaning the test tube style of shot holder that usually contains sugary concoctions with suggestively filthy names like “Buttery Nipple” and “Sex on the Beach” and “Fistfucker”)

For grins, I decided to see how the translator would backwards-translate its own translation and the outcome wasn’t exactly what I had intended it to be.  Had someone fluent in Spanish read my Evite reply, they would have read "Yes, those are gunners in my trousers and I please myself to see him."  Then they, in turn, would decline their invite in order to avoid some stranger who was going to “pleasure himself to the thought of his male host”.   The phrase “lost in translation” is how I plead Not Guilty to this charge.