BlahblahFish

BlahblahFish takes your English text and translates it into another language, then translates it back into English. The results can be pretty strange. I used the phrase "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak."

Japanese: It heats heart truly and [re] physical weakness does.

Italian: The spirit is arranged, but the meat is weak person.

Greek: The spirit is willing, but the flesh is impossible.

Spanish: The alcohol is prepared, but the meat is weak.

Korean: The spirit puts out the flag and does, the flesh omits but.

Chinese: Having more desire than energy.

Croatian: sprite had like to , limit meat had withered.

Hungarian: THE genius there is willing , but the meat there is weak.

Norwegian: Breath am willing , but carnal am breakable ,.

Romanian: the spirit is William , but the. flesh is loose.

Serbian: The genius 3. wis with IT BE from present compliant , but the meat 3. wis with IT BE from present withered.

Slovenian: wind there is yieldly , till then meat there is weak.

Welsh: ' group ghost he is being willing , except ' group meat he is being ' heartburn weak.

Latin: ghost is voluntary , nothwithstanding viscera is pale.

You can also use it for other languages besides English. Link -via J-Walk Blog

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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)
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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.
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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!
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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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This definitely illustrates that whenever you've got an important document that you need translated, you simply can't rely on online tools. We have to deal with a lot of foreign documentation and we always bring in a professional translation agency to do it.

I tried this with "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away" and the Danish came up with:

A long time ago , to a white-tie far , far away

Could have been worse. But the Slovenian:

"however long without , within however Via Lactea well away , ulteriorly"

Downright incomprehensible.
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