Funny Translations -Introduction

There's the story about the computer designed to translate between Russian and English. The English phrase "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" was submitted and then the Russian translation of that was re-submitted for conversion back to English. The result: "The wine is good but the meat is rotten."

In the early days of computing, in the 80's, a London university tried to develop a program that was so sophisticated it could translate several thousand colloquial phrases. At the official press conference a reporter entered the English phrase "Out of sight, out of mind". The resultant Russian was translated back to English: "invisible idiot". This sounds like the same computer...