Easter eggs, yay! I admire that intrepid Google employee who heard the sad news and immediately found a way to turn it into something positive. Like the folks at Best Buy who set up a table of Heath Ledger DVD's at the front of the store for all those mourners looking for something to remember Heath by.

If only...

HEATH ALERT

He counted on Ambien

And with it he dozed

But he counted too many

Now the Ledger is closed.

I typed Heath Ledger and it did translate to Tom Cruise, but then I type Tom Cruise and it came up with "Gerry"

@ChrissMari: Yes, if only. More proof that Spanish is the language of magical realism.

So Tom Cruise is the Spanish man's Heath Ledger?

I'm glad you're still around, Stein.

"El libro mayor del brezo es muerto" is what babelfish has to say about es.

Is this another Scientology recruitment tactic?

@AndSheSaid: ...and Surrealism.
@mathnet: That's rather lovely.

Babelfish's French is a bit bizarre: Le registre de bruyère est mort.

German more obscure: Heide-Hauptbuch ist tot.

Portuguese: O livro-razão do heath está inoperante.

But Google's Russian is pretty accurate: Хит Леджер мертв.

If you accidentally don't capitalize Cruise's last name, it is translated to "Gerry". And yes, I tried it, and yes, it is really really weird.

as i posted on my own damn website yesterday, this cracks me up:

[translate.google.com]

A translation of the whole article into Spanish and then back into English yeilds that not only is Tom Cruise the same as Heath Ledger but he is also the same as Brad Pitt:
"If you have been trying to communicate to their friends in the Latino community that Tom Cruise has died tragically saying, "Tom Cruise is dead", but have been confused and angered by their responses from "Cocktail but I liked the video is crazy, Cabrón ! "That could have figured out why. Apparently, at least according to the geniuses Google Translate, Spanish for "Tom Cruise" is "Brad Pitt". Curiously, the Spanish Tom Cruise is Tom Cruise. Try it yourself. Go to Google Translate, in the form of "Tom Cruise is dead" and see what happens."

Ooh, fun!
@the schef: It makes the lolcats book piece much less sensical:
[translate.google.com]

That thing needs some work. "Bill Clinton is dead" translates to "Proyecto de ley de Clinton está muerto." Which then translates back to "Bill Clinton is dead."

Oooh! Adventures in translation! Love it!

He is the eggman. He is the walrus. Goobgoobajoob.

How does one come across a discovery like this?

@Leon Freilich:

They paint these walls
to hide my pen
but the shit-house poet
strikes again!

You know it isn't very classy to steal links from your coworker's friends Flickr's and then get the sweet page view payola.... [www.flickr.com]

@flipper baby: are you reading it in like the telemundo commercial announcer's voice? because i totally am, and i'm laughing a little too much at my desk right now, basically.

@Jon Williams: demand yr four beers! and give me one (1).

O.K. That's the second saddest thing I've heard this week.

haha! They fixed it, but if you type in "Tom Cruise is dead," you get "GERRY es meurto."

GERRY? Someone please explain to me what is going on.

January 22nd

On Google Trends, #2 was "Keith Ledger". Coincidently following several Heath related searches, "rotten neighbour" was #5.

Ah, the magical world of statistical translation! There are probably MANY examples like this (especially with names). This kind of translation system is built from two statistical models: one that goes from one language to another and one that describes just the language you're translating to. You get weird bugs like this if the system doesn't line up the phrases right in the first model or if a word is part of a really common phrase in the second model. Someone should invent a form of "Google translate whacking" that looks for these...