It’s an Idiom, a Colloquial Metaphor

Those are two very different meanings.

Recently, while looking at a tweet praising a couple of my company’s products, I spotted a reply in a foreign language. Twitter offers a handy “Translate Tweet” button, which provides an inline translation of the text. What it showed was not heartening:

A translation from Turkish to English, leading to “I am sick of such applications”.

That “OK” sign at the end stood in stark contrast to the tweet’s supposed text of “I am sick of such applications”. I headed over to Google Translate to see what I could find. Initially, a very similar translation of “I’m sick of apps like this” was kicked back:

The same translation as above

I was a bit confounded by what seemed an odd message for someone to tweet in response to praise for our apps. Fortunately, a subsequent attempt to fiddle with this led to a fortuitous copy and paste issue. Once the emoji (👌) was converted to a text code (“:OK_hand:”), the translation changed quite a bit:

A translation from Turkish to English, leading to “I’m a sucker for apps like this”.

Well now, “I’m a sucker for apps like this” is a very different translation indeed. It also seems to fit better. Until a Turkish-speaking reader tells me otherwise, I’m going to assume this is the correct translation.


Update (October 26, 2022): Shortly after, confirmation of the above assumption was received from multiple sources.