Lost in translation

This week I was working with a student who's first language is Japanese, and I was showing her how to login to Blackboard, the course management system we use at Edison.

We were talking about her portable translator and I showed her the Sherlock translator on the Macs, and the Babelfish translator online at Yahoo! Where she has an email account.

When we translated the login page, something curious happened that still has me wondering - everything seemed to translate reasonably well, except "click here to login" translated as "the sound of dust here to login."

Does anyone know why "click" is translated into Japanese as "the sound of dust"? A "soft" sound, perhaps? Or the sound of a small insect?

Curious.

It is awesome, though, to see an entire webpage rendered in Kanji in a matter of seconds. I think I'll incorporate language translation and back-translation into my web Development courses to watch out for idioms and other English jargon.

--Brad