A recent tweet by Tom Cruise shows us the perils of machine translation and literal translation.
The first part of the tweet is of course absolutely unidiomatic, but you can figure out what it is trying to say. But the second part will flummox any reader who is not familiar with English expressions.
This was obviously the result of English—>Hindi machine translation of something like “We are really looking forward to talking to our friends in India when @GhostProtocol comes out soon. Anil Kapoor rocks MI4!”.
This is an important lesson for language learners too. Avoid literally translating stuff between languages unless you have some understanding of idiomatic expressions in the destination language. Also, disabuse yourself of the conviction that most expressions in your native language make a lot of logical sense. More often than not, they don’t.