"The well-being law animal will include sanctions for that mistreats to the mascots"

Nowadays anyone can translate anything, simply by putting it in a text box and pushing the "Translate" button! Type in "How are you?" and out comes "¿Cómo eres?" Easy! Unfortunately, the English question "How are you?" is asking how someone is feeling today, and the Spanish question "¿Cómo eres?" is asking someone what kind of a person he or she is (e.g., smart, lazy, tall, blond). The computer cannot tell the difference, and luckily for it, neither can you!

Here is a fun one: "They are bored." The Spanish "translation"? "Se agujerean." Does it mean what you think? Probably not. It means "They make holes in each other"! That is taking "boring" to a whole new level, and not the one you usually mean when you say that someone is bored. (To be fair, "Se agujerean." can also mean "Holes are made in them," but that is still not the first interpretation that comes to my mind when I hear "They are bored.")

I recently caught a major telecommunications company advertising for bilingual employees who could generate sales "activamente solicitando nuevas ventas del interior de los clientes" ("actively requesting new sales from clients' interiors"). I would not want to be on either side of that transaction!

When you use machine translation (such as Google Translate: http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en), more often than not, your translation will be riddled with serious errors, meanings will change unpredictably, and your reputation with other-language speakers will hardly come out unscathed, either.

Want to really put a machine translator to the test? Here are two easy ways:

1) Cut and paste a couple paragraphs of foreign-language text and ask the machine translator to translate it into English for you.

2) Cut and paste, or type in, a couple paragraphs of text in your native language, then: a) have the machine translator translate it into a second language and b) cut and paste its translation into the box and have it translate the translation back into your native language.

Of these two tests, the first one is more fair (to the machine translator) and provides a truer picture of its abilities. The translate/back-translate test has the disadvantage of undoing some of the translation errors and compounding others, so the end result will, in places, not reveal errors that were made in the first step, and in other places will exaggerate or magnify errors from that step. Using either test, though, you will be able to appreciate some of the many limitations of machine translations.

For a real translation, you still need a real translator:

La ley de bienestar animal incluirá sanciones para quien maltrate a las mascotas

"Animal Welfare Law Will Include Penalties for Those Who Mistreat Pets"