SK has blogged about Googlinglish, Google’s on-line translator tool – wherein you can translate chunks of texts or the whole contents of a web page into different languages. The translation can be done between English and French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portugese, Korean, Chinese and Japanese. Additionally, it can translate between German and French too..
He tried – The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak
Spanish – El alcohol está dispuesto pero la carne es débil
Back to English – The alcohol is arranged but the meat is weak
No problemo, so long as the booze keeps flowing 🙂
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And having read this, I spent a pleasant and constructively useful (for me, ok) morning at the google translator site… Thanks SK, I don’t remember when I last had so much fun without moving from my chair…
I started with – laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone
And followed a slightly circuitous English – German – French – English route…
Lachen Sie und das Weltlachen mit Ihnen, Schrei und Ihnen Schrei alleine
Et flaques mondiales avec vous, un cri et vous le cri riez seulement
And world puddle pools with you, a cry and you it cry only laugh
Sure, the way it is raining here, the world can only puddle pools with you…
And the English – Portugese – English version goes
ria e os risos do mundo com você, grito e você grito sozinho
it laughs and the laughs of the world with you, shout and you alone shout
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I was so enchanted that I went on…
Do unto others as you would like others to do unto you
French – Faites à d’autres car vous voudriez que d’autres fassent à vous
And back in English it was – Make with others because you would like that others make with you
Make with me, baby!
And the best was yet to come…. English – German – French – German – English went as follows (ok, I was jobless, I admit)
German – Tun Sie an andere, da Sie möchten, daß andere an Sie tun
French – faites à d’autres, puisque vous voudriez que d’autres font à vous
German – Gemacht an einem anderen Reisebus möchten Sie, daß andere an Ihnen machen
Finally English again – Made at another touring bus you would like that others make at you
Go figure that out… As for me, I am off to find my touring bus…
Update : Srikanth has pointed out this urban legend around “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak”. Do read it. Also did you know “out of sight, out of mind” English – Russian – English is “blind and insane”?
Thanks a zillion for your mention!
Glad to be the cause of your mirthful morning. 🙂
Nice post Charu…Yeah..we can play wid languages!! It’ll be fun too!!
This is bloody hilarious. But we shouldn’t criticise the tool because of that. I used it for my German language project on reading books, and it helped me a lot, although I had to change almost everything around to be able to make any kind of sense.
SK, the pleasure was entirely mine 🙂
Gangadhar, sometimes thinking in one language and translating literally into another can be disastorus.. try it 🙂
Aditya, am not criticising the tool – just making fun of it while I also derive fun out of it! and are you learning german – I did too for a long time and dont remember a word now…
quite humurous……
Am learning German at Max Mueller Bhavan. Third level now. But between each batch, I seem to forget everything I learned and have to relearn it.
This kind of translation is a lot of fun. Another such method is to write in MS Word in Hindi (such as ‘Main Pune mein Rahta Hun’) and then right-click on each word and choose the first alternate spelling.
Or you can install a text-to-speech reader and see what it does to something similar written in Hindi. 🙂
This sounds like fun – will save it for another rainy morning 🙂
Too much.
Awesome, Charu. Reminds me of a game we used to play as kids. I think it’s called telephone operator or something like that. We would sit in a big circle, one kid would come up with a phrase, it would be whispered from kid to kid along the circle until it got to the last kid. The last kid would then orate the badly mangled version of the first kid’s phrase. Hilarity would ensue. Fun times.
Also, kids used to use translators like these to write papers for Spanish classes in High School. They would type out their paper in English, feed it into a translator like Babelfish, and then turn whatever Babelfish gave them into the teacher. Of course, the teacher would catch these idiots everytime.
Vikram
Vikram, this game is also called chinese whispers and it is great fun – what the last person says sounds nothing like the original!
Try “Sushmita’s mama is nice”
Wonder if you read comments to old posts… Still:
The phrase “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” is a part of a famous urban legend.
Srikanth, thanks for the pointer – (I get comments on email)
“The vodka was good, but the meat was rotten” :))
even better – “out of sight, out of mind” reportedly yielded the phrase “blind and insane.”
Your post shows your ignorance on machine translation tools. Machine translation is known to be inaccurate. We can have some fun on its expense, but it can’t be blamed.