Why Some People Write Gibberish on Medium

And why readers absolutely love it!

© Susie Kearley

I was trying to figure out why a popular Medium writer produces gibberish, and why readers lap it up. Then someone came up with an answer that made sense…

Since the partner program opened up to 77 new countries, some of whom don’t speak English, some Medium contributors have started using translation software. They write their stories in their mother tongue, then put it through software that translates it to English.

The software is pretty good most of the time, but sometimes, it makes mistakes or translates poorly. The output doesn’t make sense.

The translation might also include sayings and oddities that are common phrases in their homeland, but are meaningless in English. So the translation software produces a certain amount of gibberish, which then gets published on Medium.

If people using this software don’t respond to their comments, perhaps it’s because they don’t understand much English.

In other cases, it might be that dictation software has been used. In one example recently, words that sounded like something meaningful were replaced by words that didn’t make sense. It could therefore be an error of dictation software.