BlahblahFish

1. JenDiggity
   November 26th, 2008 at 10:52 am

   I like how the Chinese version not only says the same thing, but does it more succinctly.

2. JenDiggity
   November 26th, 2008 at 10:53 am

   Also: I used to do the same thing manually on Babelfish for fun when I was bored. Good times!

3. Gail Pink
   November 26th, 2008 at 10:54 am

   “The Spirit is William” - LOVE IT!

4. Rob
   November 26th, 2008 at 11:02 am

   Yea- The Chinese one summarized your proverb pretty well!

5. Walaka
   November 26th, 2008 at 11:09 am

   At least a few of the dictionaries that this program uses must have some complete idiomatic expressions listed. “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” run through Czech came back as “Better an egg today than a hen tomorrow.” This gets across the sense of the original expression, but is a completely different saying that would not have been generated by close-but-no-cigar translating. The Chinese result from the Neato example looks like this, as well.

   Direct correspondence aside, I noticed that the Romance languages seem to translate more accurately than the others.

6. Gauldar
   November 26th, 2008 at 11:20 am

   Reminds me of those stories where companies first went into Asian countries and displayed advertising. I think Pepsi advertised in China with ‘Come alive! You’re in the Pepsi generation’, and become something along the lines of ‘Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead’. KFC in Japan with “Finger licking good” became “Bite your fingers off”. There is also a myth that the translation of the name Coca-Cola became ‘bite the wax tadpole’ or ‘female horse flattened with wax’, but I think that was mostly from shop owners translation of the product.

7. Dyslexic boB
   November 26th, 2008 at 12:24 pm

   Ha! “Do not want!” turns into “Want!” using either of the Chinese options.

8. Chiroptera
   November 26th, 2008 at 1:29 pm

   “Alice fell down the rabbit hole.” turned into “Alice criminal under the. rabbit cholera.” using Romanian.

9. yo
   November 26th, 2008 at 1:43 pm

   The slovenian sounds like something Sarah Palin would say.

10. yo
    November 26th, 2008 at 1:46 pm

    The reason why the chinese translation did such a nice job defining the idiom may be due to the huge effort they put into updating their translation software prior to the olympics. There was a massive effort to get rid of chingrish statements in public - many of which were due to literally translated idioms. so it’s reasonable to guess that part of the fix-it effort went into defining massive numbers of english idioms into understandable chinese definitions. Hence, the nice, succinct phrase.

    I could be wrong.

11. DOuglas2
    November 26th, 2008 at 2:37 pm

    I would be careful to know the original context of the “english” phrase before I called any of the retranslations “good summaries”. Lest I reveal how little I know of my own cultural heritage.

12. Cath
    November 26th, 2008 at 3:21 pm

    I love this, it proves how much we translators are needed

13. mouser
    November 26th, 2008 at 4:37 pm

    In 2004 I wrote a free program (for MS Windows) that does this; the latest version has tons of options and is still available here:
    http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/boomerang/index.html

    -mouser

14. sparge
    November 26th, 2008 at 4:48 pm

    I tried the classic neatorama comment:

    Old man standing tall.
    Old woman bending willow.
    Friction burns them both.

    Here are a couple of the translations:

    Portuguese:
    Aged man who is high.
    Willow of fold of the adult woman.
    The friction burns them both.

    Korean:

    Height stands on a large scale to be, the old person.
    The old person the willow which bends.
    Rubbing ignites the (thing) two which will listen all.

    Croatian:

    Old man stoppage lofty.
    Crone flexure willow.
    Limature incinerate them two.

    Norwegian:

    Greybeard stand high.
    Ancient woman bending savage.
    Friction burn her both.

    Slovenian:
    pater whack virgate.
    old woman wrapping willy.
    tussle sideboard them the two.

    (This is great! leave off the last two words and it’s even still a haiku!)

    Welsh:

    Old man standing ‘ heartburn continue.
    ‘ heartburn old female bending willow.
    Friction burns have gone both.

15. Jim
    November 26th, 2008 at 6:28 pm

    Russian-

    ‘The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten.’

16. Terry
    November 26th, 2008 at 7:44 pm

    Language shapes thought. Linguistic determinism.

17. Ando
    November 26th, 2008 at 11:13 pm

    OMG… Chinese version is right on the money. Perfect!

18. Idil
    November 26th, 2008 at 11:22 pm

    This isn’t accurate, at least not for the turkish one. Some of the words are words we wouldnt use at all for the words that I typed in english, no matter the context. (haha try to make sense of that sentence first)

19. sparge
    November 27th, 2008 at 8:44 am

    Idil, that’s the reason these are so enjoyable!

20. Gauldar
    November 27th, 2008 at 1:09 pm

    Those Welsh and their ‘ heartburn, somebody send them some Tums!

21. Tony
    November 28th, 2008 at 10:30 am

    I remember this same sort of thing, a few years ago, with a site called “Lost in Translation”- it does it via several different languages in Babelfish. I used to play a game with folks on some boards, posting the lost-in-translation of a song lyric, which they’d in turn decipher back to the original lyric.

    http://tashian.com/multibabel is the site.

22. vero4902
    November 29th, 2008 at 1:52 pm

    My friends and I started doing the manual translations when we were obsessed with Engrish… they didn’t update as much as we would have liked, so we had to get our bad translations somewhere else!

23. Joshua Cole
    December 3rd, 2008 at 7:13 pm

    Was it just me or was the Romanian translation about William Shattner and meant to be read by Shatner as well? It sure. Seemed like it to me.

24. AT
    January 5th, 2009 at 5:23 am

    I tried the classic movie quote:

    Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.

    Croatian
    Carpel diem. Possess day , boys. Fabricate yours livestock specific.
    (Umm, okay)

    Japanese:
    Diem of Carpe. Day, grasp the boy. Make your life abnormal.
    (Hentai da!)

    Italian:
    Diem di Carpe. Grippi the day, boys. It renders your screw extraordinary.
    (!!!)
    http://www.blahblahfish.com/mangle/show/123437

    Italian:

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