"Perry E. Metzger" <pmetzger@lehman.com> said:

Astonishing how far urban legends go. This keeps getting distorted further and further. I've heard this go further and further and further from the version I first heard. I wonder if there ever was a real story to begin with.

Good question. I just checked a terse history of machine translation, and it didn't mention any version of this. I suspect that its origin was as a hypothetical example of the kinds of problems that can arise, and that it didn't actually happen in any real life situation. Examples like that have always been common in linguistics papers on such subjects. Doug