Life In 19x19

hi,

I read the nihon kiin pages on Antti Törmänen: http://www.nihonkiin.or.jp.e.qs.hp.tran ... 00471.html.

The page says he is in "Nihon Ki-in senior Pope position".

What does that mean?

I note at the top of the page
"This page is translated using machine translation. Please note that the content may not be 100% accurate."
Going back to the (Japanese) Nihon Ki-in homepage and then using Chrome's inbuilt translator to navigate I find his Japanese profile page at http://www.nihonkiin.or.jp/player/htm/ki000471.html which says in the same position:
日本棋院東京本院
Google translate reckons that means "Nihon Ki Tokyo hospital" but just the last two characters as court, so my educated guess is it means "Nihon Ki-in Tokyo branch" (i.e. which geographic branch of the Nihon Ki-in is he affiliated with), but maybe someone who can actually read Japanese can confirm. Senior pope certainly sounds more fun!

本院 = hon'in = this institution; main institution

It's not 'position', but 'affiliation' and he is affiliated not to the Vatican but to the Nihon Ki-in main (Tokyo) branch.

It looks like the translation software may be experimenting (unsuccessfully so far, evidently) with semantic clusters, hence 'main' -> 'senior', and 'temple' -> pope.

Humans produce this sort of rubbish, too, incidentally. I remember in my first job as a translator for an electrical generator company that a rating plate translated from English bolted onto a transformer exported to Russia told the user the (oil) consumption was x litres. The poor Russian operator, however, read that the machine had x litres of tuberculosis. Very Chekhovian, though, I suppose.