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We all come across badly-translated spam in C-D before the mods get to weed them out. At first I couldn't for the life of me understand how they can translate so horribly. And then I remembered - Babelfish. So I went to the site and did a little experimenting.
The original sentences in English, taken off my monthly insurance bill statement:
Quote:
Your payments can be automatically deducted from your bank account. You can choose to pay monthly or all at once.
Now we translate from English to Portuguese to French to Dutch and back to English. The final result:
Quote:
Their payments can be inferred automatically from their bank account. You can choose the monthly illustrated magazine or d' to pay; once.
I was tempted to toss Japanese in there but worried I'd get a string of banned words
Anyone else want to play? Find just a couple of sentences and translate the heck out of them, then return the original + results here for our entertainment!
I Babelfished a sentence from English to German and then back to English. Here's the result:
Started with: The debtor shall timely file all required documents with the court.
Ended with: The debtor is document within the prescribed period all necessary documents with the court.
I went back and Babelfished the same sentence from English to Italian to French to German to English and ended up with this: The debtor Lima documents required current all this with the yard.
What a hoot!
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If you ever get a chance, you should look up the book, "English as She is Spoke." It's basically an English & Portuguese phrasebook, adapted from a French-Portuguese phrase book. So it was basically translated from Portuguese to English by way of French. It makes for an often amusing read.
LOL that is funny but from my experience it comes down to the fact that we do not have an universal language or thought pattern so that many times when I am translating, from English to Spanish and back again, I have to ask the speakers to stop. the ideas being said have no translations. I need to think for an equivalent idea rather than translating word for work which is how most translation programs function.
Phrase books are often written by people who have an imperfect knowledge of one language or the other, and proof-read and type-set by editors who no knowledge of either.
Last edited by CowanStern; 05-22-2012 at 08:24 AM..
Well this was a sorry experiment. I thought people would like to do this for FUN - as a little amusing game-type of entertainment. To see what outlandish results we could come up with. Instead, I see you all dissecting the idea of translations.
What a bunch of killjoys. Le sigh. I'll go slink back to Health and Wellness.
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