Kara & Michael’s Blog

When I first happened across this site (via a Google search) I assumed it was some strange fluke that would be gone in a week or two. Yet months later it’s still around, and I still have no idea what this site does.

Let me try to explain. It appears to be a storefront where you can purchase all kinds of snack food from around the world, possibly through something like an Amazon affiliate. I don’t really know, and it’s a pretty mundane concept anyway, except for two important points:

• You cannot actually purchase anything from the site, at least not in any way I’ve been able to find.
• Every word of the product copy on the site is hilariously mangled. It looks as though it’s been sent through a bad English->French->English translator.

Seriously, visit gourmeton.com. It’s amazing. Here are some screenshots of a few choice items:

EDIT: I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what makes gourmeton.com’s horrible translations tick, and I just can’t. I found a corresponding English description for one of their products (Bob’s Red Mill Buckwheat Pancake Mix) and tried running it through different translators. I looked up the WHOIS for the site and they seem to be Dutch, so I tried translating the pancake mix description from English to Dutch and back to English with Google Translate and got this:

Start your day right with the distinctive taste of hot and fluffy, old-fashioned buckwheat pancakes. Our Buckwheat Pancake and Waffle Mix is full of irresistible taste and wholesome goodness, because we use only the best natural ingredients – stone ground whole wheat flour, dairy sweet whey, real buttermilk, aluminum-free pure sea salt and leavening.

Pretty darn intelligible. Similar results with English->French->English. Yet Gourmeton’s description for the same item is this:

Start your daylight right-hand according to the typical flavour of raging and downy, out of date polygonum fagopyrum pancakes. Our Buckwheat Pancake and Waffle Mix is replete of fresh excellence and resistless flavour on this account that we habituate only if the finest every one of instinctive ingredients – lapidate run aground unit metric grain flours, henry sweet dairy farm milk whey, existent buttermilk, aluminum-free leavening and virgin flood common salt.

I am speechless. I would love to know what software–or, God forbid, person–produced these hilarious results. I also found a different item that actually advertised itself as a good source of “atomic number 20 and atomic number 15.” WTF?

EDIT, AGAIN: My curious poking around has revealed a whole new world of terror. “Gourmeton” is but the tip of the iceberg. There are sister sites, featuring the exact same terrible translation, for every category of merchandise you could imagine. Don’t like gourmet food? Take your pick from jewelry, car parts, tools, kitchen accessories, musical instruments, health & fitness items, toys, DVDs, beauty products, photography equipment, office supplies, electronics, or sporting goods. This must be some sort of affiliate link-spamming scheme, but I have no idea what their strategy could possibly be.