Adventures with Google Translate

As I mentioned in a previous post, I am looking for a way to mark status effects on miniatures during Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition battles. Lots of cheap gaming supply can be found in regular hardware stores. So I thought of using the kind of thin disks with a hole in the middle used to put under a screw to distribute load. I knew the German word for it, "Unterlegscheibe" (German is a very precise language). But that wouldn't help me a lot in a Belgian hardware store, so I used Google Translate to find the translation into Dutch. Big surprise: Google Translate translates the word from German to Dutch as "wasmachine". Now I don't speak much Dutch, but that is clearly a washing machine, and not the piece I want. How can Google Translate be so wrong?

Well, after experimenting a bit, the truth about how Google Translate works dawned on me. Google Translate does not in fact translate from German to Dutch. It translates from German to English, and then from English to Dutch. And the English word for "Unterlegscheibe" is "washer". Which then gets interpreted as washing machine in the translation to Dutch. Doh!

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