True Confusion For Fun and Profit
Often times, when generating a mock-up on a design, I won’t sweat over the actual content, and I’ll fill it with Latin filler text. For a long time, it was my naive assumption that everybody was familiar with the existence and function of Lorem Ipsum, but about 40% of the time, my clients come back with, “What is this? Why is my website in Italian?”
Forty percent? That’s not nearly confusing enough! So I decided to make use of Google Translate and translate the filler text from Latin to English, which turns this:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Morbi mi nibh, venenatis eu sodales non, fermentum convallis nunc. Sed pretium libero a magna sagittis mattis. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Praesent eget purus turpis, eget fringilla arcu. Donec sed risus vitae arcu lacinia lacinia. Cras nec nibh iaculis felis mattis fermentum vel vitae nulla. Etiam scelerisque, libero a malesuada venenatis, tellus risus pharetra augue, ac sollicitudin libero erat venenatis nisi. Donec lobortis nibh in lacus dignissim facilisis. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Aenean in enim sit amet ipsum consectetur molestie. Nullam ullamcorper dapibus arcu quis venenatis. Donec id tortor vitae sapien consectetur interdum ut sagittis libero. Suspendisse sagittis, urna vel tempus tincidunt, orci elit auctor leo, non faucibus enim leo vel dui. Donec non erat purus, a ultricies nunc.
into this:
Welcome to Monday, to cancel reply. Add to my more, no more new members, you here now. It’s a free real estate. Resources Keep your sad old age and spanned, and the advising hunger for more information. We need more pure, Boasting bow. We are always here It’s here. Read more Read more Read more or no life. Even more, the more free here, more more more here, and here was only for free. Enter your selection until you reply. E-mail address and avenging the school develop its curriculum by Aeneas into the following Back here. Do any one no bow here. It’s sometimes more to an agent’s free. More arrows, more time or more, here’s the author of a lion, a lion or not, allows for more. I was not pure, more from now.
That ought to make a few people good and crazy. “What does it say?! I swear, I know he’s trying to communicate with me!”
I think the bigger point here is that Google Translate is broken. According to it, ‘vestibulum’ translates into ‘e-mail’. I call shenanigans on that.
I use www.lipsum.com for large swaths of filler text, but people are getting increasingly silly with such offerings as Hipster Ipsum, Bacon Ipsum and Lebowski Ipsum.