Finding Reviewers

I'm looking for readers. 

It's a little over two months until A Tine to Live, a Tine to Die releases and I have a couple dozen advance review copies of it to give away (Preston stays here, though!). What I want is reviewers with a wide reach. 

I've contacted several respected reviewers who I met through Facebook and they agreed to read the book. The Natural Farmer, the newsletter of the Northeast Organic Farming Association agreed to review it for their June edition, which goes out to 10,000 subscribers. I even asked Johnny's Selected Seeds to read one and they said they could mention it on their social media.

Another thing I did was start a Goodreads giveaway.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Tine to Live, A Tine to Die

by Edith Maxwell

Giveaway ends April 04, 2013.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

I don't hang out on Goodreads much but probably should!  

My publisher is handling the big review sites, like Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and major newspapers, as well as publications like Edible Boston. I'm not sure how that works but am leaving it up to the publicist there. 

If you have a venue where you could circulate a review to a lot of readers, please contact me and we can talk about arranging an ARC for you. I want to get the word out!

Machine Translation: Potential for Crime?

My friend Karin posts on Facebook in Swedish. This makes sense. She's Swedish. I amuse myself by reading her posts out loud and trying to figure out what she's saying. I've studied German, which is, if not a sister language, then certainly a kissin' cousin of Swedish.

For example, she recently wrote: "Det blir ju inget varmvatten när man har luftvärmepump! Antingen får jag elda lite för att kunna ta en dusch, eller helt enkelt gå o träna för då ingår dusch. Kan man duscha på gymet utan att ha tränat först? Kan man se matinköp som träning?"

I read it. Hmm. Something about 'wind warm pump'. 'Dusch' sounds a little like 'douche,' 'shower' in French. 'Kan man' sounds like 'Kann man...' in German: 'Can one...? Then my friend Tim M ran it through Google Translate, getting the following results:

"It'll no hot water when you have a heat pump! Either I get burned a bit in order to take a shower, or simply go o work out for the shower included.
Can you take a shower at the gym without having practiced first? Can you see food shopping as exercise?"

This is fun. I was right about the "Can one...?" and "shower." But look at the grammar and fractured English in the automatic translation. Swedish and English are pretty closely related. Can't Google the Great do any better than that?

Then imagine the potential for international criminals sending messages with machine translation, and what a forensic linguist could do with that. Ahh, says the writer, rubbing her hands together in anticipation. So much material, so little time...

Do you have experience with automatic translation gone bad, or even human-produced results misunderstood?