I find myself fascinated by the forged DRK invoice. At first glance it looks like the shitty desktop formatting common to 2001, its in a German two ring binder, crumpled and yellowed.
But then there are multiple things which are obviously and subtile off, the most glaring is the obviously AI-translated phrase at the bottom. I'd love to know the mind of the forger. They did put some serious work into the invoice but then AI-translated an idiomatic American phrase (wrongly!) which wouldn’t by used on a German invoice.
It’s accepted that the US movies and television industry can’t get contemporary Germany right [1], often for economic limitations of the productions, but something that still get’s me is when the badly pronounced dialogue was obviously written in idiomatic English and only then translated mindlessly word for word, as if other countries cultures and languages are semantically the same, only the words are different. Maybe that’s what happened with the forger - you can’t know there would be differences if you don’t have a sensibility for difference.
>It’s accepted that the US movies and television industry can’t get contemporary Germany right
The US movies and television industry can rarely get any language right. This reminds me of the Dutch-speaking scene in Oppenheimer which no Dutch speaker can understand [1]. It's like a sped-up pronunciation of a nonsense Dutch sentence by an English-speaker trying to speak a horrible German accent.
Also, in "Spider-Man: Far From Home", a 2019 movie with a 160M budget, they go to "The Netherlands" which was shot in Chech Republic, and it looks like Prague but with tulips, with a Polish actor supposedly talking Dutch. And then Spider-Man gets arrested and thrown in a "Dutch" jail which does not look at all like a Dutch jail, but is obviously some middle-european building, which makes sense as "Amsterdam" was shot in Prague too
The video you linked to says that in the movie it's explained that Oppenheimer spoke German, and learned Dutch in a short amount of time. If so, him speaking Dutch with a German accent seems appropriate, if slightly exaggerated.
However a novice in a foreign language will speak more slowly than natives, not more quickly, even if reading a prepared speech (as was likely the case in that setting, and especially given the advanced language used that no beginner would have mastered), so not sure what the thinking was there.
Haha this had me chuckle as a native Dutch speaker.
I will admit that they nailed the German-Dutch accent.
However, the weird choice to use “translatie” which, while technically is a Dutch word, wasn’t common even back in the period this is supposed to take place and feels more like a lazy translation of… well the English word “translation”, combined with, what I can only describe as “just blurt it out as fast as you can” direction, makes this very comical.
> AI-translated phrase at the bottom. I'd love to know the mind of the forger. They did put some serious work into the invoice but then AI-translated an idiomatic American phrase (wrongly!) which wouldn’t by used on a German invoice.
This is especially stupid because LLMs like ChatGPT CAN output phrases that wouldn't be out of tune. I assume the forger got that phrase by literally asking the LLM to translate an english phrase to german, rather than asking the LLM what would be a good german phrase to use.
> literally asking the LLM to translate an english phrase to german
I tried it a few times on arena.lmsys.org and given the prompt "Please translate "We thank you for your business" into German", the most common result was "Wir danken Ihnen für Ihr Geschäft", I got one bad result from some random tiny model and some more extensive responses from Gemini with suggestions for more idiomatic expressions. Modern LLMs are typically smart enough to understand this nuance when translating to German.
That’s an interesting result. I’ve re-run your prompt with one change (made it “translate idiomatically” instead) to guide models towards a more natively German mode of expression and a few actually came back with a more appropriate phrase than that literal translation.
Would you’d like to share? The most analogue I can come up with would be ”Danke für Ihren Einkauf” – but that wouldn't be printed on an invoice. The only place where I can see such a sentence would be on thermoprinted receipts from POS, those small boilerplate nobody reads.
That’s my point: You can make a semantically and possible idiomatic translation but it would be still _culturally_ wrong to use it in this context.
When we forged some documents it had a photo of a grotesque in the background. We worked out where it was and photographed it ourselves. Had to stand on a trash can to get the angle.
We joked our documents were high quality than the original, which they were.
Used them for years.
Do it. It all makes sense after actually doing it yourself. People think forgers copy pixel by pixel but it's remaking assets.
We guessed the iso standard on the barcodes. We were no experts. We probably got it right, but you have to do this on every asset.
But then there are multiple things which are obviously and subtile off, the most glaring is the obviously AI-translated phrase at the bottom. I'd love to know the mind of the forger. They did put some serious work into the invoice but then AI-translated an idiomatic American phrase (wrongly!) which wouldn’t by used on a German invoice.
It’s accepted that the US movies and television industry can’t get contemporary Germany right [1], often for economic limitations of the productions, but something that still get’s me is when the badly pronounced dialogue was obviously written in idiomatic English and only then translated mindlessly word for word, as if other countries cultures and languages are semantically the same, only the words are different. Maybe that’s what happened with the forger - you can’t know there would be differences if you don’t have a sensibility for difference.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskAGerman/comments/1ct1k73/what_is...