D-I-S-P-O

One of my pet theories is that every tech company has a guy somewhere in the organisation whose job title is “visionary architect of making everything slightly worse”. He (and I’m sorry to be one of those dudes who disses other dudes to ingratiate himself to his female readers, but yes, I’m sure he’s a he) is the one behind all those little changes to apps that make them look sleeker but leave the user frustrated and annoyed because they are harder to use. Anyway, the guy who holds that role at google translate has obviously been busy because its latest incarnation is hugely irritating. Well done, mate.

It remains quite useful though. I’ve just written a text about street food and I mentioned a disposable glove. As usual, when I finished, I pasted it into gtranslate to see what it thought I’d said. It translated it as “available glove” because I’d used a false friend: Disponível. The word is obviously related to disposable but it means available. It’s easy to see the link. If you’ve ever heard anyone say “I’m at your disposal”, the person wasn’t asking to be thrown in the bin, they were saying they were available to help. So the meanings must have drifted apart relatively recently but it’s worth knowing the difference.

What should I gave said? Descartável. That’s easy too. You can discard them.