Google announced today that Kai-Fu Lee, president of the search giant’s China operations, has left the company to start a new venture. Lee joined Google four years ago from Microsoft, where he was a corporate vice president, and the Redmond software giant subsequently sued Google over the hire, contending that Lee’s duties at Google would violate the terms of a non-compete agreement he signed as part of his Microsoft employment contract. The three parties later reached a settlement.
Google said Kai-Fu Lee is leaving to work on his own venture, but not content with knowing so little about the man’s plans for the future, I turned to Google’s Translate service to learn more.
The goal: translate Lee’s blog post and tweets in English for more clarity on the matter. The result: hilarity.
Take this tweet for example. This is what Lee is saying, according to Google Translate:
“To continue to talk to my employees interesting: in 2006 in Jiangsu and Zhejiang Kai-Fu hosted exchange, just who is in the Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Tina, or exchange to another table, called a la carte Kai-Fu advisory matters. Kai-Fu Lee to smoked tea duck and after the class Meat recommended that the vegetables you casually Come on, anyway, are not tasty Where could they be to eat, when the drug ate enough.”
Or this one:
“To continue to talk to my employees interesting: in 2006, when the Chinese first came to know that people in Chengdu, after Kai-Fu, and once I asked why not, Kai-Fu in Chengdu has also opened an Office, the Land of Abundance Well, beauty is also good to eat more than the work of engineers passion will be greatly improved. Kai-Fu said that you all play happy, I will not happy again.”
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To be fair, Chinese is not an easy language to learn, let alone translate, but you have to admit the Google Translate service’s desperate attempts to extract meaning out of the (now former) Google executive’s words are funny as hell.
The translation of the man’s blog post is better (barely), and reveals that building Google in China hasn’t exactly been a breeze and that Lee now wants to pass on his knowledge and experience to Chinese youth.
Or not.
