Google Translate Update: The State of Bloggery

According to the OED, as related in yesterday's post, bloggery is a non-word. The stodgy old Oxford gatekeepers don't allow many new words into the English language lexicon, so the term is likely to remain without a home in the dictionary. It's surprising to learn, then, that Google Translate is at least aware, so to speak, of the coinage and has actually changed the way it's gone about translating it.

In 2012 when I first took a look at this, Attempted Bloggery's French language version was called Tentative Bloggery.

Now I wasn't crazy about the use of the word tentative, but I considered the made-up bloggery to be absolutely untranslatable, so I was glad they subjected the French to it in its pure, unadulterated form. But now things have changed. Here's yesterday's post, in today's French translation:

This new harsher translation of my title, Tentative de blogging, does not sit right at all. How did the fanciful yet untranslatable bloggery become the very workaday blogging, let alone in French? These words do not mean the same thing. Blogging is the creative act of crafting an online post. Bloggery is the detritus that remains when the effort has fallen a bit short of what the author had hoped for.

The translation of the Lorax quotation has also changed since 2012. Google Translate's algorithms are no doubt being tweaked all the time. But who thought the algorithm would have changed the translation of a non-word like bloggery?

Note:  Sacré bleu! Worldy fans may prefer to read Attempted Bloggery in French (or in whatever language they choose) here.

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