What if someone doesn’t know the language at all? Do they look up (for example) an English-to-Spanish dictionary and do the slow manual version of what the translation software would do? That doesn’t seem like it would be any better. And if they just don’t translate their message at all, there’s a solid chance the person on the other end is going to be putting it into translation software anyway.
Personally, if I have occasion to software-translate something, I put a note at the bottom saying it’s software-translated. That way any mess-ups will make sense.
(Plus, the translation software is usually decent nowadays. It’ll tend to at least get the general idea across fine.)
The example I gave is from a romance scammer around two decades ago who was apparently in Izhevsk, Udmurtia, and was apparently an Udmurt with imperfect knowledge of Russian or a man pretending to be a woman. (Udmurt does not have gender, but Russian does. The details aren’t relevant.) The Russian is “на дне рождения”, where “дне” is the locative case of both “день” (day) and “дно” (bottom). S/he meant to say “on my birthday”. Someone using a dictionary would look up “день” and get a correct, but awkward, translation like “on day of birth”. Only using a computer could one come up with “at the bottom of birth”, and only someone who knows some Russian would be able to figure out what was meant. I’ve seen a similar mistranslation from Spanish which was something like “I do exercise, road, and as many vegetables”, which was supposed to be “I exercise, walk, and eat many vegetables”.
Don’t know the context, but it’s usually a reference to having nothing to eat (air pie and wind custard, lunch is “air pie and a walk around”).
Now, there’s also the possibility that it’s a bad translation of “air biscuit”, which is usually the result of the action of the gut biome on certain compounds. You can probably figure the rest out without assistance.
