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Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Language Lessons

I am plagued with Chinese comments on my posts that I am pretty sure are not genuine comments, but links to malware, spyware or viruses. They are in simplified characters and I occasionally translate the phrases with a very effective online service. The phrases used to be mostly X-rated links, but lately they have a Confucian, fortune cookie/Chinese T-shirt quality and are sometimes vaguely related to the post topic, likely triggered by keywords:
  • What kind of learning program is not important, it is important what kind of person you are.
  • Good blog requires us to work together.
  • It takes all kinds to make a world.
  • Long drive straight toward the planet's people, the inverse falter on the road in the gorge who achieve their goals more easily.
  • When a person's heart can hold different conflicting things, this man started to become worthwhile.
The online translator breaks out all the characters word by word by meaning, and is helping me recognize some and understand how the sentences work...I wonder if the intent of the spammer is to help me learn language?

In the meantime, if you see one of these comments, which I do not moderate, but delete when they appear, do not click on them to find out more. Or I may just start publishing the translations. In fact, I see an opportunity for a whole new blog: translated Chinese spam, along with a glossary of the bizarre verification words I enter in other bloggers' comments sections. This is a feature I should probably enable, but I find the Chinese spam is beginning to be entertaining.

2 comments:

The Rambling Taoist said...

I rarely see this kind of spam in the comments section of my blog, but I do receive a lot of it via email. I agree that the translations can be quite funny!

baroness radon said...

I suspect it's because I visit a lot of Chinese sites and write about China a lot. I'm on the bulk mail list. Blocking my blogs and Facebook while I was there was bad enough, but these skirmishes in cyber-war are annoying I know it's spam because sometimes the comments have been exactly the same on both blogs. I just don't want anyone else to get in trouble because they click on one of the hyperlinks.