Re: French translation for “Computer bought the farm”

[Luca Saiu]

On 2013-03-08 at 00:43, Samuel Thibault wrote:

> - « L'ordinateur a cassé sa pipe. » (“Computer broke his smoking pipe”)

> - « L'ordinateur a mangé les pissenlits par la
> racine. » (“Computer ate the dandelions from the roots”)

Both very funny :-).  I personally prefer the second one for its surreal
imagery, but as you know I'm not a native French speaker.

> I also invite native speakers of other languages to fix such grave bug
> in their respective languages.  The german version is a litteral
> translation too, for instance.

In the italian language an informal way of rendering "to die" is "tirare
il calzino", literally "to pull (one's?) sock".  The complete translated
sentence would be "Il computer ha tirato il calzino".

The etymology is unclear.  It sounds quite inconsequential even for a
native speaker, a little like "to kick the bucket" in English [1].

I think it's good that you're trying to "keep the fun in computing", as
Alan Perlis said.  This might be good for the image of the Hurd in the
long run.

-- 
Luca Saiu
Home page:   http://ageinghacker.net
GNU epsilon: http://www.gnu.org/software/epsilon
Marionnet:   http://marionnet.org

[1] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kick_the_bucket