how i love automatic translators. just enough info to get by and plenty of humourous moments too.

i was signing up for the associates program at amazon.de (in order to use the amazon web services

which have recently expanded beyond the us and uk to germany and

japan). my mostly forgetten schoolgirl german wasn’t quite cutting the

mustard so i turned to babel fish

for a little assistance. having successfully made my way through the

sign up pages i was looking at a message that i guessed meant “right,

you’re done, go away and build your website now” but i pasted the

phrase into babel fish to check i wasn’t missing anything important:

Vielen Dank für Ihre Anmeldung

Sie haben nun Zugang zum Amazon.de PartnerNet.

Sie können jetzt fortfahren Ihren Online-Store aufzubauen.

Thank you for their registration you have now entrance to the Amazon.de

PartnerNet. They can now continue your on-line net curtain to

construct.

wonderful! i’m off to construct net curtains.

it seems that it’s just “store” that translates to “net curtain” and i suspect “online-store” in german means just what “online-store” in english means but i love the parallel use of net all the same.