One of my friends replied to my Christmas Greeting email from yesterday.
At the end of his post were four Chinese characters.

聖誕快樂;

I don't read Chinese but I figured they were probably "Merry Christmas".
All the same, to be sure, I popped them into Google Translate.

It detected the language not as Chinese but as Japanese and provided a translation that said

誕快 Lok St.

Switching to Chinese I did, of course, get "Merry Christmas.

That's weird. The first 2 characters form part of 聖誕祭 (seitanchii) Japanese for "Christmas".

This message has been edited. Last edited by: goofy,

quote:

聖誕快樂

I put it into Bing Translator for traditional Chinese, and it translated as "Merry Christmas and a happy." The Japanese in Bing was translated as "Holy Nativity."

Is your friend Chinese or Japanese? If not I suspect he put 'Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year' or similar into Google Translate then put the result into his email.

He's English and I think you are right - I just found the randomness of the Japanese version very weird.

Traditional Chinese: 聖誕快樂 shèngdànkuàilè

Japanese

It starts to make some sense.

Google translate has assumed Japanese, translated one Kanji as "located" which has incorrectly been abbreviated to Lok rather than Loc and another to "saint" which has been abbreviated to "St".

It hasn't for some reason translated the other two at all, possibly because the corpus translation technique used by Google translate has never encountered that combination of symbols used in Japanese before.

(Incidentally, thanks for the very useful Chinese Dictionary link above)