A hilariously mangled machine translation from a Japanese developer asking for help with Shibboleth software has become legendary in tech circles. The message, featuring phrases like goat-time, vomit, and the wind, a pole, and the dragon, has puzzled readers for years as they try to reverse-engineer what the original question actually meant.
The original post appeared on the shibboleth-users mailing list, where someone used early machine translation to describe installation problems. The result was a confusing mix of technical terms and bizarre phrases that left the community both amused and genuinely curious about the underlying issue.
Original Context:
- Platform: Shibboleth SSO (Single Sign-On) software
- Issue: Installation/runtime errors with Java
- Translation method: Early machine translation (pre-modern AI)
- Community: shibboleth-users mailing list
Cracking the Translation Puzzle
Community members have made significant progress in decoding parts of the message. The most obvious translations include vomit likely coming from throw (as in throwing an error) and lumber referring to log files. The phrase goat-time appears to be a mangled version of runtime, referring to the Java runtime environment.
One of the most intriguing theories about the wind, a pole, and the dragon comes from understanding Chinese characters that might have been involved in the translation chain. Some suggest these could represent software configuration elements - wind as custom settings, pole as limits or parameters, and dragon potentially referring to flags or other system components.
Key Translation Theories:
- "vomit" = throw (error)
- "lumber" = logs (log files)
- "goat-time" = runtime (Java runtime)
- "spank" = hit/execute
- "wind, pole, dragon" = configuration settings/flags (unconfirmed)
The Complexity of Early Machine Translation
The translation failure highlights how early automated translation systems struggled with technical jargon and idiomatic expressions. Unlike modern language models that can maintain context and natural flow, older systems often produced literal word-by-word translations that completely missed the intended meaning.
When you're native at a language, you often don't realize that you're using an idiom. By that I mean when you use an expression that means something different to what the literal words mean.
The distance between Japanese and English grammar structures made these problems even worse. Japanese sentence structure and the way technical concepts are expressed can be vastly different from English, leading to the kind of spectacular mistranslations seen in this case.
Community Theories and Ongoing Mystery
Despite years of analysis, some parts of the message remain unsolved. The phrase insult to father's stones has generated theories ranging from expressions of frustration to references to software dependencies or ancestral building blocks of code.
Some community members suspect the entire post might have been deliberately created as a joke, possibly by running text through multiple translation engines in sequence. However, others point to the technical context and specific error messages as evidence of a genuine support request gone wrong.
The enduring appeal of this translation mystery shows how the tech community enjoys collaborative problem-solving, even when the original issue has long since become irrelevant. It serves as both entertainment and a reminder of how far machine translation technology has advanced in recent years.
Reference: The Wind, a Pole, and the Dragon