GoogleTranslate and Dutch

[Benjamin Barrett]

It's kuronbo or kurombo, with a long "o" at the end. é»’ã‚“å .

There was a thread on this: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa

The word can also mean tanned person, however.

Benjamin Barrett
Seattle, WA

On Feb 12, 2012, at 2:33 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:

> Since users of Google Translate are able to make modifications to it
> with greater ease than they can to Wikipedia, if I find a translation
> that I know to be incomplete or incorrect, I don't hesitate to take
> steps.
>
> Why complain? GT isn't the OED. It's meant to be only helpful, not definitive.
>
> BTW, cross-referencing among translations into languages other than
> English can be helpful, unless you're monolingual in English, as can
> googling the word.
>
> E.g., dekkids ago, I read in EBONY that _kurambo_ was the
> Japanese-language equivalent of "nigger." Naturally, having grown up
> in the United States, I had no reason to accept an assertion by some
> random black dude about a language as exotic as Japanese as fact. Over
> the years, I'd been unable to verify this in the usual lexical sources
> or even on this listserv. When GT became available, it was no help.
> So, I googled _kurambo_ and found out not only that this word is
> indeed used to mean "nigger," but also that, in Japlish slang,
> _(numba) ten_, in addition to meaning "the worst," means "Jew,"
> punning on the fact that _ju_ [dZu:] is the Japanese word for "ten,"
> in one of that language's counting systems. Back in the '60's, a white
> acquaintance who'd been stationed in Japan in the Air Force told me
> that this was the case, but, because of his own, over-the-top
> anti-Semitism, I thought that he might well have just made that up
> himself and then attributed it - or even taught it; youneverknow - to
> the Japanese.
>
> So, if you GT _kurambo_, you will now find "nigger" as a translation,
> based on my research.

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