The client had helpfully supplied a glossary with the English translations of the various parts of the equipment.

One of them caught my eye:

Erection status monitor

I suggested to the client that they change that one to something a bit less, erm, suggestive. This is one of the few cases where I'm looking forward to seeing the camera-ready proofs to see what they went with.

Hat tip to blogging translator for mentioning the site.

Incidentally, leaving out Japanese, Chinese, and Korean from our language chain, we get the much more understandable (!?):

In the houses of the crystal the rocks would not have that to play.

Perl

Choose perl if you think that scripting is for quick-n-dirty tasks, and your language ought to look like it. Or if you like how it looks when Snoopy swears.

Ruby

Choose ruby if you think that perl is pretty cool, but it should be even more powerful.

Python

Choose python if you think naming your throwaway variables "spam" and "egg" is really witty. Or if you want to write really cool stuff. (No bias here, no sir!)

JavaScript

Choose javascript if you're cowboy hacker or a genius hacker (or both).

VBScript

Choose vbscript if there's no hope for you whatsoever.

Lua

Choose lua if you like squeezing into small spaces.

I would love to see this adopted at the Enterprise level. Could you imagine slipping sentences like these into your next corporate-drivelspeak document?

The vendors have really bent over backwards to make introducing Coq as painless as possible.

We don't believe in shoving Coq down people's throats. In fact, we've found that once people have had a taste of Coq, they never want to go back.

Here's hoping.