Found in Translation 4: la Vendetta

As a foreigner living in a foreign country (that’s wired; notice that I’m a foreigner to the indigenous, and this country is their own; but if I go temporarily to my country of origin I become an indigenous living in a foreign country; and the indigenous from my place of residence become indigenous in a foreign country or foreigners in their own country, for me; and when I come back… well, I’d better leave it up to the philosophers, or to the IRS, which calls me a resident alien (especially for tax purposes),) I often have to deal with documents and translations in various languages. Recently, I had to translate a police certificate from Italian to English.

My innate laziness prompted me to use the help of the world’s highest ranking web site, Google. So I entered a paragraph in the translation box of the related web page. The paragraph contained the phrase carichi pendenti, which translates into English as pending charges. The dear Google returned it as hanging cargos. I could have sent to the immigration office a certificate stating that I had no hanging cargos. If the authority of Google says so who am I to contradict it? But, hey, wait a minute, I’m an alien, I can contradict it.