TRANSLATE THIS.

Would you like to translate this page?” Chrome asks.

Araceae-untranslated

The page in question is simply a list of species in the family Araceae (the arum family, which includes the locally abundant Jack-in-the-Pulpit, as well as familiar ornamentals like Callas, Philodendrons, and Anthuriums) that grow in southwestern Pennsylvania.

Pushing the translate button was too great a temptation. This was the result:

Araceae-translated

Although most of these terms turn out to be the same in Latin and in English, there are some actual translations. For example, it turns out that “foetidus” is “smelly.” Good job, Google! It also turns out that the arum family in Latin is the tomato family (Solanaceae) in English. “Atrorubens,” which Dr. Boli had thought meant something like “dark red,” turns out to mean “McNeal” instead. And “Symplocarpus” means “Robinsonella,” which “is a genus of flowering plant in the family Malvaceae,” according to the omniscient Wikipedia; that is to say, a genus of plants that have nothing to do with the arum family.

The algorithms that produced these translations are probably opaque to human understanding, but it is comforting to know that the era of reliable machine translation has arrived at last.