Techno-strange - Chrome - Word

[Rabelais]

I have been noticing over the past few days that texts in emails (my Yahoo account) are scrambled and almost incoherent in some cases. I at first suspected that the writers were mentally disintegrating, but it is happening in the same fashion from several different sources. In addition there will sometimes be a bit of French in the English text, and random words in a sentence which have improperly capitalized first letters. Here are a few examples:

This is from an alt medicine newsletter.

Researchers Have Observed Discrepancies Between now what was reported about in trial publications and what was Described in internal pharmaceutical company research reports. What we are finding out is trial que les publication reports are not clear or accurate, putting much of what doctors assume to be true to be false.

...

Researchers Have found That fake and poorly made ​​antibiotics are used to treat Being Widely tuberculosis [note the gibberish factor]. These substandard drugs are Almost Certainly making the disease more resistant to drugs, posing a serious health threat to Communities around the world.

Since I am predominantly using Chrome for my browsing, and Chrome has an auto detect gisted translation feature, I was thinking that maybe this was the source of the phenomena.

This is a snip from an email from a business colleague.

As I was thinking about it later She Could think Karen was a customer of yours and since you could not ship the product you Referred her to me. Interesting. que les Also note balance 50% of your order...

Note in the above the gibberish sentence structure, random upper case letters and "que les" again. This email came from a person who is always meticulous in her communications and speaks not a word of French. It is very out of character. Its almost like a bad OCR scan. Some of the garbled emails are replies to previous emails from me. The text in my original email is unchanged and as sent, so the problem is in the incoming mail.

So, I have just about convinced myself that this is all some bizarre Chrome/auto translate glitch bleeding into Yahoo, when I type out a Word doc this morning. Just before I hit print, I do a quick proofread and see that WORD has randomly capitalized letters throughout the text, as it is happening in the emails. I didn't even have a browser open at the time. So far it has not affected the Thunderbird mail accounts.

I know that I can go into Chrome>tools>encoding and reset the auto translate feature, but now that WORD is getting the same strangeness, I wonder if its something else... hyperdimensional gremlins?

Any thoughts or suggestions would be most welcome. This is coming at a time when the scan feature on my combo printer/copier has just croaked. After trying every troubleshoot fix and printer forum suggestion it persists. All other features on the machine work fine. It is now a problem beyond my skill level, so off to the shop it went. When it rains it pours.

 

[Scottie]

That is totally bizarre... Given that it's happening in 2 different apps, I'd do the whole Full Scan routine with all anti-malware goodies you've got.

If that doesn't find anything, I would perform an exorcism.

 

[Buddy]

Rabelais, do you dictate? IOW, do you ever use Dragon Naturally Speaking (DNS) with or without 'KnowBrainer' or 'Nuance'? If so, you might get some tips starting here:

_http://www.knowbrainer.com/forums/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=3&threadid=489&highlight_key=y

 

[Rabelais]

Rabelais, do you dictate? IOW, do you ever use Dragon Naturally Speaking (DNS) with or without 'KnowBrainer' or 'Nuance'? If so, you might get some tips starting here:

_http://www.knowbrainer.com/forums/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=3&threadid=489&highlight_key=y

Nope, I don't use any of that nor do I dictate.

 

[ocean59]

That is totally bizarre... Given that it's happening in 2 different apps, I'd do the whole Full Scan routine with all anti-malware goodies you've got.

I agree with Mr. Scott's advice. There are a large number of 'prank' viruses out there, that while not necessarily (but still quite possibly) harmful, simply mess with little things like what you are describing. I would be running multiple system scans at this point.

If that doesn't find anything, I would perform an exorcism.

This should also fix the problem. ;)

 

[Buddy]

At this point, I also agree with Mr.Scott and Jason. I did a few Google queries and discovered a lot of people having the same or similar problems. No one seems immune, from users of MS Word, dictation software including Google voice to forum software to Motorola Droids and iphones. Really strange.

 

[Scottie]

At this point, I also agree with Mr.Scott and Jason. I did a few Google queries and discovered a lot of people having the same or similar problems. No one seems immune, from users of MS Word, dictation software including Google voice to forum software to Motorola Droids and iphones. Really strange.

I did a quick search and didn't come up with anything. I guess my search terms weren't the best.

It kind of makes me wonder though... If this is widespread (although this is the first I've heard of it), it kind of reminds me of the newscasters speaking gibberish.

 

[Buddy]

At this point, I also agree with Mr.Scott and Jason. I did a few Google queries and discovered a lot of people having the same or similar problems. No one seems immune, from users of MS Word, dictation software including Google voice to forum software to Motorola Droids and iphones. Really strange.

I did a quick search and didn't come up with anything. I guess my search terms weren't the best.

FWIW to anyone, here's a few queries I saved that can lead to some of the hits mentioned:

Issue with Google Voice auto-capitalization
Issue with auto-capitalization
Random letters are capitalized during texting
word randomly capitalizes letters
Capitalization of random words
Controlling Case
Random Capitalization of letters in the text
Storm Randomly Capitalizing second Letter in Words?
insert word errors in ms word
Automatic Capitalization
Disable AutoCorrect's automatic capitalization in Word
Random Capitalization (Note: even XBox is involved)
Random Capitalization Syndrome
Capitalization glitch
Translation glitches

It kind of makes me wonder though... If this is widespread (although this is the first I've heard of it), it kind of reminds me of the newscasters speaking gibberish.

My thought too, but then I said nah, couldn't be. Now I wonder.

 

[Sirius]

Can you test one of those sites with multiple, at least two different browsers? Do those phrases also appear within the page's source code?

 

[Buddy]

Can you test one of those sites with multiple, at least two different browsers?

What do you mean? What sites and test how?

 

[Sirius]

What do you mean? What sites and test how?

Opening one such particular site (anywhere peculiar texts appear) with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and with any browser available and then comparing the results. If only one browser shows differences, the browser should be the source. Chrome can be nasty.