Google’s Garbled Greek

 

 

As anyone who can write a grammatical sentence will know, Google, like Microsoft, is barely literate in English. In other languages it gets incoherent — try the ‘Translate this page’ thingy up at the top of many Google pages; I once, just for fun, tried it on a poem by Rilke — and in other alphabets, such as Greek, it can’t even manage basic articulacy.

In yesterday’s blog post about Nikos Kavvadias, then, the few Greek words I had used were turned into a jumble of Roman and mathematical characters in a variety of typefaces. So here — I hope; I shall take special care but it might happen again — are the Greek words I used, in the order in which I used them, with an approximate English transliteration and a translation or explanation.

 

Βάρδια	Vardia	Watch, in the sense of shipboard vigil
Καïμός της Ρομιοσύνης	Kaimos tis Romiosynis	The anguish of being Greek
Πόρτο	Porto	Port (in all the same senses as in English)
Κάβος	Cavos	Cape (headland) or cable
Μιγάδη	Migadi	(Female) Mulatto; also shot glass
Μπούσουλο	Bousoulo	Ship’s compass
Φαστφουντάδικο	Fastfoodadiko	Place selling ‘fast food’
Λαμαρίνα	lamarina	Literally a sheet of metal, but the ship in nautical slang
Μποστυλίδι	Bostylidi	Variety of grape

 

If anyone is still with me I should say I am not certain that I have got the Greek spelling of the last word correct; it would take too long to find its occurrence in the original. But at least this time the Greek letters have come out right.