Whilst the boundless choice of language from spammers may be annoying/offensive/hilarious (or all three), reports over the weekend claim that spammers are now using machine translations to bolster sales. So, quite serious then…

Due to the rise in popularity of machine translation, it has at last found its way onto the workflow of the spammer – making emails for all things “extra inches” a truly universal gripe – with major European countries reporting a 95% spam rate!

Universal gripe: Multilingual spam

In response to the news, John Dixon, Translation Service Delivery Director at Applied Language says: “Machine translation gives you about 75% accuracy, but it can’t recognise context, so this has the potential to be a really worthless move for spammers.  Of course, with some of the reported margins involved in spamming, translating mass mailers was always a no-brainer. You can’t help but wonder then, why they haven’t employed a professional translation company for marketing translation – or even post editing machine translation.”

Indeed! Though it’s very useful for individual word references, machine translation has yielded some examples you really couldn’t make up.  Amongst the few recent spams we’ve heard of so far (please feel free to add any others in the comments section), the viagra pill that “leaves you nothing to hope for!” was one of the funniest – and most honest!

Read the full story here.