Saturday, October 08, 2011

the rear of the hair in the easiest and best way

We're all accustomed to clearing a bit of spam out of our webmail accounts - you know, that phishing, advance fee fraud and herbal Viagra stuff that clutters up your inbox and your junk mail folder and obscures that vital and long-awaited mail from the cantilevered genital truss suppliers.

I've never had spam in Arabic before, though, so I was slightly taken aback to get a few in the last couple of days.


Now normally you can just scan down the list and go: yup, herbal Viagra, 419, 419, fake Facebook message, phishing, herbal Viagra, etc. and then just click "empty". But how to know what the Arabic messages are telling you, or indeed selling you? It could be something really important, like directions to the Ark of the Covenant or something like that. Luckily Google Translate has an Arabic capability these days, so let's do a bit of cut & pasting and see what we get:


Well I don't remember that from Koran school. Let's try another one:


Well I don't know if doing it "Basahel ways" makes any difference, but that appears to be essentially the same thing. How about the next one?


Those crazy Sri Lankans. Here's the last one:


That doesn't make a lot of sense, but that's just the subject line; the body of the e-mail goes on at some length in similarly incoherent vein. Whether this incoherence is a property of the original e-mail or of Google's translation I'm not remotely qualified to tell you, but this one seems to be a bit more in the standard vein of trying to get you to buy something rather than obsessing about clitoral hygiene or male breast-feeding, which to be honest is something of a relief.

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