If you live in Wales, or maybe the wider UK, you may be familiar with this story from earlier this week:

It was covered by the BBC, The Daily Mail, etc Shocking and sensless racist attack on property and animal. Made all the more ironic by the fact that the "English" people being attacked were actually Welsh, from Cardiff. "This is a Welsh-speaking area and they might have mistaken our Cardiff accents for English, that is all I can think," said the victim.

Everyone reports that the grafitti daubed on the farm reads "English out". Hence the racism.

Except it doesn't. The grafitti "Cai Maes Sais" is practically gibberish. Apparently, it SHOULD read "Cer Mas Sais". So where does the "Cai Maes Sais" come from?

Well... if you go to Intertrans, the translation software, and type in "Get Out Englishman", it comes back as "Cai Maes Sais". Incorrect, BUT it implies that the person who wrote the graffiti wasn't a Welsh-speaker at all. It was someone who used translation software to make up a Welsh slogan. Why would people in a Welsh speaking area use translation software? It also implies that no-one from the news services bothered to check up, they just reported it as they were told.

Translating Welsh by machine isn't a straightforward matter, so it's not all InterTrans fault Infact, machine translation is a common problem. If I was Dyfed-Powys police I would be looking at local computers, to see if any of them had used a translation website or similar in the day or two before the attack. this thread is illuminating.

I followed a link earlier, to a BBC News story about Edios and Lara Croft. Yeah, well, the reason it is interesting (being a non-gamer) is that you can watch the news footage on the page, via a flash player. This is actually a big deal for the BBC. Usually when you read a story and click a "watch" link, a window opens up and you have to watch the footage in Real Player. Or maybe, on occasion, Windows Media Player.

A couple of years ago, I remember someone from BBC Online being interviewed, I think on Radio 4. Anyhow, he was asked why the BBC insist on streaming in Real format. He said it was all tied up with licensing, it would cost too much to switch to another format. But that was before Flash video took off. Flash is perfect for the little 2 minute news items the BBC show, involves no licensing fees (aside from a FLV converter), and is cross platform. I hope that the BBC adopt it site-wide, and drop the Real streams. I uninstalled Real-player about 7 years ago, and I'm damned if I'm installing it again.

Its also future-proof, and mobile ready (as soon as there is a mobile browser that will play flash streams. Probably the next version of Symbian will provide that via Flash Lite).