Lost in Translation

In the movie Lost in Translation, Bill Murray's character is shooting a commercial in Japan. The director, who has a clear vision of what he wants, is working through a translator to get his point across. The best the translator can do is say "with intensity". The actual message gets lost in translation.

It's easy to find examples of translations into English gone awry:

Belgrade elevator: To move the cabin push button for wishing floor. If the cabin should enter more persons, each one should press a number for wishing floor. Driving is then going alphabetically by national order.

Rome doctor's office: Specialist in women and other diseases.

Copenhagen airline office: We take your bags and send them in all directions.

Acapulco: The manager has personally passed all water served here.

In enterprise-scale networks, there are usually separate security and network operations departments. The security staff set policies, and rely on the network operations staff to translate these policies into secure network configurations. How reliable is that?

The company I work for, RedSeal Systems, eliminates errors translating between policy and implementation. In addition, it allows the security staff to continuously monitor that the policies have been accurately implemented -- an essential step, given the many configuration changes required in a dynamic enterprise environment. Not only can our solution ensure that nothing gets "lost in translation", we can verify that the security policies continuously remain in force.