More on machine translation

I was warning my students today about the dangers of using "full-sentence translation" features on their electronic dictionaries, giving examples that I've talked about before (here and here).

Now I've got a new example: Danwei has a recent post about Google's machine translation, which says,

A Danwei reader sent in Google's translation for the English word "flippant". It comes out as "刺杀布什的凶手" or "the assassin who stabbed Bush" (see this screen shot).

(For why that happened, check out the original post.)