Title of the Day

Het groot ligt door den waeren Brabander

A colleague brought me two French Revolution political pamphlets with this title today because I'm the go-to guy here for Dutch and Afrikaans. She was at a loss because she'd tried running this through GoogleTranslate and ended up with "it is by the great wares Brabander". Actually, the title on one of the pieces is slightly different, ligt being spelled licht (coinciding with the modern standard spelling; the pronunciation would be the same in either case). Machine translation being what it is, the programme spits out a completely different translation of it, namely "the beam through the wares Brabander".

Partly this is Google's usual problem with archaic spelling (normalising waeren to waren gets you the proper translation, "true") but I'm still not sure why "great light" should be equated to "beam". I'm just sorry she couldn't remember how she mistyped it on a previous attempt to get "something about a big Dutchman".

Things this latest project has taught me about my colleagues up the road

1. They can't tell a monograph from a serial.
2. They can't count to four.