The Euro of Gibberish

I was on assignment in Geneva recently, when a friend showed me something he had found on Google–two things, actually.

The first was an article I wrote some years ago about driving an electric car through the Vermont winter–translated into German. Very good German.

Curious, he clicked on Translate This Page to see if it gave the original English version, but what he found wasn’t my English version. It wasn’t even English. It was Google.

“may I drive cars to mine into your stable?” it was called, and it became steadily more opaque from there.

“I had the failed idea to lease electricalmobilely and to drive it in the winter by Vermont.”

What?

“If own car means, a 1986er Volvo, I must sell before I it on the autocemetery throw.”

It didn’t read like any known language, though I discovered that if I read it aloud in an accent that wandered all around northern Europe and the Baltic, it started to make sense–or rather, it sounded like the kind of nonsense that might make sense to someone.

“A petrol engine keucht and sweats of, therefore we can make the best from its lausigen work simply somewhat from this warmth into the interior branches and.”

It was a pan-European googledigook.

In that sense, it was the opposite of Esperanto. Esperanto is a perfectly consistent language that nobody uses. This was a perfectly inconsistent language that potentially everyone on Google used.

That evening, dining alone in a Genevan restaurant, I overheard two men talking an unfamiliar language, and for a second I wondered if I’d broken through the virtual wall and was now in the dimension where Google was the lingua franca.

But as the men nodded and laughed, I realized I must be wrong. They understood each other. If they’d been speaking Google, every sentence would have fueled a frustration rising to fury.

“I do not know, to which this switch is good”, said Ron with inclined view.

“If I come in to someone, I “I can put legend in?”

“It arrive only on how full our wallet is.”

“But I was already a trailer!”

Google had invented universal nonsense. It was the Euro of Gibberish.

This speak has been across carried from it original Google. All reserves righted.

First aired on NPR early in 2005.