"A könyvek az asztalon szörnyűek."

Translation: The books on the table are terrible.

[Arcaeca]

(The table is covered with every book I ever had to read in high school English)

[BetsyLowe]

There's a better word for "terrible": borzalmás. "Milyen volt a napod?" "Borzalmás!"

[GregWood15]

Google Translate offers "badger apple" as a translation of "borszalmás". No idea what a badger apple is, though. If you leave out the accent on the "a", it'll give you "horrid" et cetera.

[RyagonIV]

Borzalmas, with just a 'z'. Google Translate is fun. If you feed it a word that doesn't actually exist, it makes its best guess for a translation, based on what it knows about the language.

Borz means "badger", alma means "apple", and the '-s' suffix makes it into an adjective. So borzalmás would be the adjective form of "badger apple".

That makes me wonder if borzalmas actually derives from borz. The grammar would work out.

After a bit of research, they apparently aren't. Borz is of Turkic origin, and borzad, the base word of borzalmas, developed from ... an onomatopoeia? Neat. But the similarity is striking.

[AnCatDubh]

As in of poor quality or describing terrible things?

[BigWayne19]

--------- as in awful . . .

[aoyagi_uirou]

Does this "terrible" mean as fearful and horrible in its contents, or as very bad in its condition or quality?

[RyagonIV]

My first instinct is "poorly written", but it can also refer to the content. Bad condition would rather use rossz.

[Gabor111594]

The books on the table are dreadful - I would have thought dreadful would be an equally acceptable option.

[GregWood15]

It's just that it is not among the limited set of synonyms supported by this application. You get to recognise which words they use in the application. This also serves to separate the learners from the users of online translation applications (not that I'm entirely innocent of such crimes).