Episode III : The Backstroke of the West

[whathuh]

Star War The Backstroke of the West

I don't know if this has been posted yet, and I didn't feel like reviving that old episode 3 thread, so here it is, The Backstroke of the West!

Here's a few of my favorite lines:

"Worry to lose is to lead to the evil augury"

"I was just made by the Presbyterian Church"

"Get up"

"The geography that I stands compares you superior"

My goodness that was funny.

[[wcip]Angel]

Amazing. :P

I will never complain about Norwegian translations again!

Thanks for that. Makes you wonder just who these translation-people and what qualifications are needed to get such a job.

[Archon_Wing]

Hah, stupid grammar rules and figures of speech ;)

The translation actualy isn't that bad, it's just that things don't transfer between languages, thus making double translations always silly.

[--Pete]

Hi,

Hah, stupid grammar rules and figures of speech ;)
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Yep, it's those idioms that get translation programs (and human translators) every time.

My favorite classic is "Out of sight, out of mind" which when translated to Russian and back became "Invisible and insane".

I was raised in a bilingual household where we often spoke a language best described as "Italish". Somewhere along the line, the English idiom "A horse of a different color" got combined with the Italian equivalent (literally, "a different pair of sleeves") to give us "a horse with different sleeves". I doubt that there was a fourth person in the world who knew what that meant. :)

No two languages can truly be translated one into another, for no two cultures think alike. But it's fun to try ;)

--Pete

[Kylearan]

Hi,

No two languages can truly be translated one into another, for no two cultures think alike.[right][snapback]85466[/snapback][/right]

That's especially true for poetry, and yet people try just this again and again. My favorite example for such a failure is the following, unfortunately understandable only for those who can read German (I won't make the mistake of trying to translate this into English :P ): A famous poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wanderers Nachtlied, was translated into Japanese in 1902, then translated from Japanese into French in 1911. Then, a German literature magazine, believing it to be a Japanese poem originally, translated it back into German. Here is Goethe's original poem:

Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh',
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.

This is the result of the Japanese-French-German translation, printed in the magazine under the title of Japanisches Nachtlied:

Stille ist im Pavillon aus Jade
Krähen fliegen stumm
Zu beschneiten Kirschbäumen im Mondlicht.
Ich sitze
und weine.

:blink: :P :lol:

(This was taken from the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, German translation)

-Kylearan

[yangman]

:lol:

Thanks for that laugh.

Chinese speaker, I actually found it hard to come up with the Chinese phrases that would have caused most mistraslations. It was either adapted to Chinese really well, hence harder to traslate back, or really really poorly to beginw with. My bet is with the latter. :P

The double and triple pluralizations are hilarious.

[[wcip]Angel]

Hi,
That's especially true for poetry, and yet people try just this again and again.

I know poetry is difficult to translate into another language, but not impossible.

The husband of my teacher is a norwegian poet. He's working with an English linguist (not his wife) to translate his poetry into English. They work closely together. He explains exactly what the poem is saying in every possible way and also every linguistic attribute of each word, and the linguist tries to find the most suitable English phrases for their Norwegian counterparts. It's really quite astonishing. I've heard some of the poems in both languages, and they're actually quite 'translatable' :)

Of course, this differs from poet to poet, and also how much of a collaborative effort is made with the person trying to translate the poems :)

[whathuh]

Glad everyone enjoyed it. I know there are many expressions that do not translate very well. I think the translators did a very good job translating from english to chinese, but an absolutely awful job on the retranslation. There are some expressions that I didn't even know about, and I speak English, so one side had to do a decent job on their translation.

[Archon_Wing]

Glad everyone enjoyed it.  I know there are many expressions that do not translate very well.  I think the translators did a very good job translating from english to chinese, but an absolutely awful job on the retranslation.  There are some expressions that I didn't even know about, and I speak English, so one side had to do a decent job on their translation.
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For some real fun, go to Babelfish or another online tranlsator, translate it about 5 or 6 times (diffrent language) each time, and see what do you get.

The result somtimes resembles certain legal documents though. -_-

[Zarathustra]

For some real fun, go to Babelfish or another online tranlsator, translate it about 5 or 6 times (diffrent language) each time, and see what do you get.

The result somtimes resembles certain legal documents though. -_-
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Forget 5 or 6 times. Just take a sentence in English and translate it once to the language of your choosing, and then back.

I'd suggest "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?"

[Munkay]

Forget 5 or 6 times.  Just take a sentence in English and translate it once to the language of your choosing, and then back.

I'd suggest "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?"

All you need to do is find a webpage in Russian and translate it to English.

I received the sentence "I tired, pancakes, put hysterics!" while reading a russian website. Somehow I doubt that was the intended translation, considering the topic was about Sun Microsystems' Java.

Cheers,

Munk