Confusing automated translators.

[Andrew Dalke]

Alan Kennedy:
> I'd love to hear of other similar phrases. And somehow I intuit
> there's people in this ng who know lots of them :-)

Related, for speech recognition:

  "It's hard to recognize speech"
  "It's hard to wreck a nice beach"

(! Only 9 Google hits for "wreak a nice beach" and none for the full
phrase?)

And I tell the story about how in 9th grade we did sentence diagrams
(a form of parse tree developed by english majors :) and the first one
was
   "Have you ever seen a pilot fish?"
Turns out this is ambiguous.  I have two uncles who are (or were) pilots,
so I was thinking - have I ever seen them fish?  Not, "ahh, a 'pilot fish',
like on sharks."  The rest of the assignment was equally difficult if you
didn't realize the difference.

That was 20 years ago, and I'm still annoyed :)

                    Andrew
                    dalke at dalkescientific.com