I've just been reminded how difficult it can be to translate texts from one language into another. In some languages complex sentences and 'flowery' verse are fine, but that text translated directly into other languages (but still following rules of grammar) just sounds wrong. Yes, the target language was English in this case. 450 words took me about an hour to translate... into 600 words. I'm really out of practice.
Back in the late 90s, I was working for an overseas development agency. These were the years when spam and e-mail trojans were just beginning to bite, so I was naturally suspicious when the IT department recieved an e-mail with the subject line "Graphic love PAPS" and a Word attachment. On (carefully) opening the Word document, I wasn't reassured to find it containing a badly written poem and a picture of a flower, so I went looking for the malware payload. I was very surprised to find out, on further investigation, that the e-mail was entirely innocent.
The e-mail was from the Pakistani Aids Prevention Society, hence PAPS (and the broken English of the rest of the message). It was a friendly fraternal message (inspired by some local holiday), hence "love". And they attached a nice picture to go with the friendly message, hence "Graphic". Lost in translation, eh?
