If you’ve spent any time around designers or the Internet, you’ll at least have a

passing familiarity with a chunk of text so pervasive online that it’s almost
invisible. Called Greeking or Lorem Ipsum, the chunk of Latin is used by many
designers as a placeholder for text on Internet pages. And, until recently, it
could have been a secret language for spies.

First, a bit of background. The text used by designers once came on large pages of
decals called Letraset. Designers would use it in place of actual text on spec
designs. Internet designers adopted it as a standard place filler (in lieu of
curses or “Text Goes Here” over and over) and it has become the white noise of the
Internet, a sort of gray ooze that appears but is considered innocuous. Here’s a
chunk:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. In sapien augue, tempor
nec dignissim vel, varius at tellus. Fusce non massa non sem feugiat condimentum in
in magna. Nam a felis ut arcu accumsan tempor gravida ut diam. Donec molestie
cursus lorem, in lacinia urna consequat a. Curabitur rhoncus quis lectus nec
aliquet. In risus ante, suscipit et ligula sed, commodo consectetur mi. Aenean
vestibulum porta risus et molestie. Maecenas nec lectus ornare, posuere risus
varius, imperdiet libero. Quisque non posuere felis, quis viverra magna. Curabitur
varius tortor quis nibh consequat fringilla. Curabitur vel molestie dui. Morbi
dolor risus, gravida sit amet metus in, sollicitudin dapibus enim. Nam non sagittis
dolor, non tempor tellus. Sed ac blandit diam, euismod dignissim nisi.
Now here comes the weird part: today Brian Krebs wrote about a glitch in Google
Translate that automatically turned Lorem Ipsum (in various permutations) into
decidedly modern and nefarious-sounding English. Lorem ipsum became “China.” Ipsum
lorem became “Internet” and “lorem lorem” translated to China’s Internet. There
were a few more, but sadly for us conspiracy buffs Google has changed Translate to
actually translate the text directly.

What could be going on here? Well, we know that Google Translate works by
crowdsourcing translations from the Internet. For example, it doesn’t directly
translate many tricky foreign phrases – it would lose the nuance. Instead it
searches for previous translations of the same thing online and brings those up in
real time. This assumes (correctly) that there are millions of pages out there
written in multiple languages, a sort of mass Rosetta Stone that allows Google to
avoid the heavy lifting of machine translation.