Feedback: Positive beauty of laboratory tests


BABELFISH, in Douglas Adams's masterpiece The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, were small animals that you put in your ear to translate all languages. They thus "caused more and bloodier wars than anything else", Adams said. Feedback suspects Google Translate has some way to go to be credited with even a small war.


Journalists have been struggling to piece together what is happening with MERS, the scary coronavirus that at the time of writing had infected 163 people and killed 71. Most of the cases have been in Saudi Arabia, but epidemiological reports issuing from the country are scarce.


So enterprising non-Arab-speaking journalists have been machine-translating reports in papers such as Al Arabiya – and discovering headlines such as "Medical tests prove the innocence of the beauty of the 'Corona' yet". This article goes on, according to Google, to say that the quest for "scientific knowledge of whether beauty ...


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