A famous translation exercise (well, famous among wordish-nerdish types) takes the phrase “one man’s meat is another man’s poison,” translates it into Russian, and then back again into English. I can’t find the result online anywhere (maybe the exercise isn’t as famous as I’d thought), at least without buying access to a document apparently by someone speaking at a language/English conference. But it was predictably bizarre, as literal translations tend to be.
A Web site called Translation Party (which I just found courtesy of an acquaintance’s “shared items”) automates this. The translation process begins with an English phrase; you click on the “find equilibrium” button, and off it goes — translating the phrase to Japanese, then back into English, then feeding the translated English back into the translate-into-Japanese engine, and so on. “Equilibrium” is said to be reached when the engine repeats the same translation twice.
Here’s what I got from the famous tagline (well, famous among movieish-nerdish types) tagline for Jaws II: “just when you thought it was safe to go in the water”:
Please also enter the water safely.
If you try it yourself and come upon a translated phrase so good that you just have to look at it, like, once a month*, note the link at the bottom which stamps your result onto a T-shirt or mug.
The Internet world is so full of strange and/or wonderful things…
By the way, feeding the “one man’s meat…” line into Translator Party doesn’t work. It just goes back and forth, repeatedly switching the two phrases on either side of the “is.” Eventually it gives up and says equilibrium will never be reached. (I know how it feels.)
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* Depending on the frequency of your laundry cycle.
DarcKnyt says
Interesting. How incredibly interesting. It’s fun to know how things look in other languages, and how what we put in comes out so differently.
Back and forth, back and forth … no wonder we’re all so confused. Great fun! Off to try it!
marta says
That is fun. I’m going to share it with my students.
John says
Darc: I wish I knew another language, just one, besides English. (There was a time when I was real comfortable with Latin, of all things, but that probably doesn’t count. Giving Latin as an example of a language one knows is kinda like giving a two-wheeled chariot as an example of a vehicle one knows how to operate.)
There’s a company called (I think) Rosetta Stone which claims to offer the fastest way to learn a new language. Tempting, but not at hundreds of dollars each. :)
marta: Wonder if they’d appreciate it? In a way, this Translation Party thing stops just short of making fun of Japanese (although it no doubt could work just as well, or ridiculously, in either direction)… maybe they could try working it in reverse, from/to their own language.
I haven’t tested this theory at Translation Party, but I seem to remember that the way to get the most “fun” results out of a word-for-word translation is to start with a figure of speech and/or idiomatic phrase; those are notoriously hard to translate, because their meaning goes beyond the words themselves.
The sentence, “The Harry Potter series freaked me out!” got all the way to “I’m freaked out by the front, the Harry Potter series!” before Translation Party gave up, claiming, “It is doubtful that this phrase will ever reach equilibrium.” Which seems to me the very definition of freak-out.
s.o.m.e.one's brudder says
J, thought I would take a somewhat famous architectural quote to see where it would go. Took one from Philip Johnson. Not impressed. Goes from “you can not not know history” to ” the ignorance of this history is not”. I’ll have to try some others.
recaptcha: plays cornice – which Philip Johnson certainly could be said to have done.
marta says
I’m always trying to get students to stop directly translating. I was thinking that if I showed them this, they might see why translating programs and reliance on their dictionaries does not help them. I get some crazy sentences in essays because they rely on computers to translate everything.
recaptcha: pollutionless romanoff
John says
brudder: “Form follows function” was definitely a dud, if you’re looking for “interesting” translations. “A Festivus for the rest of us” led to a cop-out, if you ask me: it didn’t even try to translate “Festivus,” just tacked that English (??) word onto the end of the usual bunch of Japanese characters.
Do you remember adults saying “Hope the rain don’t hurt the rhubarb” when they were pretending that whatever they’d just said wasn’t for kids’ ears? That becomes “Rhubarb, you must have rain.” I kinda like it!
marta: “Don’t cry over spilled milk” -> “Runoff should not be crying.”
This verges on the sort of sense the reCaptchas make.
All: Notice, too, how the message from Translation Party — down by the result line, like below the “Equilibrium reached” message — changes over time. You can do better than that, it might say, or You’ve done this before, haven’t you?, or even Translation Party is hiring.
cynth says
Okay, I went with “little pitchers have big ears”, meaning little kids hear everything (as opposed to big kids with hearing aids, but I digress). The Translation comes to “Will have the largest ears of a pitcher” which misses the point, I think. Then I tried “resting on your laurels”. The translation reached equilibrium at “the rest of your glory?”
Recaptcha says: endowed this
And I have to believe this is true!