[petercooper]

It's a different era now, but back in my day Altavista had just launched Babelfish and a few of us began using it for our French homework. My friend got "caught" due to the "peculiar" nature of his work, and while they couldn't figure out what was happening, we were all warned quite sternly to stop doing whatever it was we were doing. Lesson learnt: only use Altavista to read French ;-)

[distances]

I have a similar story -- our Swedish language teacher congratulated a classmate of his excellent Norwegian essay. I have no recollection any longer what and how actually caused his mixup, but he would've definitely been caught in any case as the output was far above his skill level.