Let’s have a little fun with Google Translate again.
We tried this a few months ago with mild success, so I thought I’d give it another go.
Basically, I just take famous passages from literature, then kick them through a gauntlet of 5 to 10 languages and spit them back out in English. Then we see what we’ve got.
Sometimes it’s funny. Sometimes it’s weird. Sometimes it’s fairly similar to the original.
And off we go:
From Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury:
“Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”
Translate from: English–>Bulgarian–>Latin–>Arabic–>German–>Japanese–>English. And you’ll get this:
“But fuck this will please the eye that it is the truth , if it it was 10 seconds, and live in the autumn . Please look at the world . This is he , is the dream took place in industrial enterprises , or they pay for the paternal.”
Well there went the PG rating. I don’t think I’ve ever had the F Bomb on my blog, so WTF is up with that translation?
Here’s the famous line from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, which appears 106 times.
“So it goes…”
Send that through English–>French–>Slovak–>Haitian–>Punjabi–>Vietnamese–>Serbian–>English. And you get:
“For him.”
And that was a bit anticlimactic.
Here’s a good one. A famous passage from Oh, the Places You’ll Go! By Dr. Seuss:
“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go…”
English–>Dutch–>Korean–>Malay–>Polish–>Lithuanian–>Turkish–>English
“Do you have a hair on your head . You have your foot in the shoe . You can fly in any direction you choose. You are your own. And you know . I decided to go somewhere.”
Amazingly, that one’s pretty similar.
Here’s a classic line from To Kill A Mockingbird:
“Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ’em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
English–>Georgian–>Afrikaans–>Norwegian–>Filipino–>Russian–>English.
“Reach all the Bluejays you want, if you can hit him, but remember that etogrehuvlekatelny murder.”
Etogrehuvlekatelny murders are the absolute worst animal murders. PETA is going to be pissed.
How about some Beowulf?
“Hand to hand is how it will be, a life and death fight against the fiend, and he whom death bears off shall submit to the judgement of the Lord.”
English–>Bengali–>Belarusian–>Danish–>Kannada–>Hindi–>Persian–>English
“Hand in hand, it’s a life and death struggle against apostates, and the death of God, in the Court, it wears.”
Just doesn’t have the same ring to it, huh?
Last, let’s check out a passage from Gatsby:
“There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”
I sent this one through English twice.
English–>Basque–>Greek–>Traditional Chinese–>Hungarian–>Irish–>Somali–>English–>Icelandic–>Macedonian–>Swedish–>English
“This is the neighbor house in summer music. Gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the Son whispering and the champagne and the stars.”
All the words are there, but yeah that just doesn’t make sense.
Overall, I think Google Translate did pretty good this time. Other than the fact it gets all vulgar with Fahrenheit 51 and mentions those terrible etogrehuvlekatelny murders.
Until next time!
