Desperately Seeking Microsoft Dogs
I had no idea what kind of product “Microsoft Dogs for Windows 1.0” was... it was never released in Japan. I was desperately seeking Microsoft Dogs couple of hours ago.
Let me tell you why I was desperately seeking the Dog from the very beginning.
We have a machine translation project which we are hoping as a better and faster and also cheaper way to translate English technical documents into multiple languages. Microsoft Japan has been using machine translation these years as pilot and trying harder to improve the quality of translation. You can actually see those machine-translation KB articles at Japanese Product Support site.
It was kind of nice funny surprise for Japanese customer when they saw a KB article with a title "Dogs: Minimum System Requirements". We usually don't translate product name into any languages. So when I saw the Japanese word "Dog(s)" it's like... I am not sure this is aptly expressed my feeling when I saw it in Japanese KB but I guess it is like you find "Rat" instead of "Mouse" in the computer related document.
As I introduced in my Japanese blog (http://blogs.users.gr.jp/michiko) there are some people who find funny machine translation for (mostly) fun like Mr.Kawabata (http://blogs.sqlpassj.org/yoshihirokawabata/category/128.aspx?Show=All). After the good laugh we were getting really curious about the Dog. What is it? Now we know the Minimum System Requirements for the Dog but where can we find it? How it looks like? It is strange but machine translation led us to a discontinued old product. And Ladies and Gentlemen, this is the Microsoft Dogs : )
