Google Translation Fail - An Obituary

I have friends who live in various places around the world.  One of my friends from France had a relative who died.  I googled for the obituary.  Since is was on a server in France, and I operate in English, Google Chrome automagically decided to translate the obituary for me.  Here is the result:


you are sad to announce the death Geneviève ******* occurred December 16, at the age of 84. The worship of thanksgiving will be celebrated Tuesday, December 18, at 15 am at the Church of Temple Prostestante Unie de France Condé-sur-Noireau. According to his wishes, the collection will be done without his presence. That natural flowers. It will not be sent invitations this opinion in its stead. The family thanks the people who will be associated with his sentence. Mrs. Florence ****,  303, rue de Paris, Flers

French should be an easy language to translate it. If I can speak French (and I can), any reasonably trained computer program should be able to understand and translate.  And Google is the best of the best, and yet it still can't get it right.  It didn't know context. It didn't know it was an obituary.  It didn't even know that the subject was a woman. It confuses gender more than once.  The most intriguing part is that the poor 84 year old woman appears to have been sentenced to death, according to the second last sentence in the paragraph, and the family seems happy and filled with gratitude over the death sentence.

This just proves the old adage:

If the translator is a man, HE translates.
If the translator is a woman, SHE translates.
If the translator is a computer, IT translates.
If the translator is either a man or a woman, S/HE translates.
Whether the translator is a man, a woman or a computer, S/H/IT translates.

Alan Turing, Success & Failure, Truths Gleaned From The Film.

While watching the movie, "The Imitation Game"( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2084970/ )  about Alan Turing and solving Enigma, breaking the German World War II codes, I became acutely aware of something.

• Failure is an integral part of success!
• Only by failing can we succeed.
• Success requires a feedback loop from failure, and a learning step.
• Success is a process.

And finally, success brings satisfaction, but rarely does it bring universal happiness.

Five Common Mistakes That Cause a Web Design Project To Fail

Here are 5 common mistakes that cause website design to go off the rails and the project to fail in its intentions, goals and objectives:

1) Not hiring brand designers to develop the image, brand and message.   When you give this job to the  web developers instead of hiring communications and marketing experts, you are on the road to failure with your website.  Web design and branding are two different skill sets.

2) The same goes for content written by the web developers.  Content should always be written by subject matter experts.

3) Trying to be hip or cutting edge where it is not called for.  If you are appealing to a conservative audience, you do not want your website to look like it is a advertisement for Grand Theft Auto.  A culturally inappropriate website design  destroys your value proposition and loses customers.

4) Features that don't work.  This is my biggest pet peeve.  I went to the Home Depot website and searched for reverse osmosis filters.  I knew that they had them, I just wanted to do a price comparison.  The on-site search engine gave me results for everything but that.  I finally gave up.

5) No story boards or navigation planning.  Do an ad hoc websites results in spaghetti navigation.  To logically get your message across, you must have a logical plan instead of links that take you everywhere that distract the reader from your value proposition and buy message.  Excess linking and navigation dead ends just make the surfer hit the home button and leave your page quickly.

The goals and objectives of your web design should be stated clearly before any design work is done.  From those, you create a requirements document and a brand design.  The next step is the coding and then the quality control should happen before your website goes live.