Sunday, August 27, 2017

Itchy Feet Month #27: Imperfect Translation


  1. Hahaha. Seriously.

  2. Yep, the problems with online translators... Useful if you want to look up individual words or phrases, but longer sentences almost always get messed up.

  3. Have you ever watched "The Backstroke of the West"?

    1. I thought not. It's not a story Hollywood would tell you. It's a fandom legend.

      Way back when Star Wars III Revenge of the Sith was released there was a Chinese bootleg. This bootleg had an English subtitle option but that was a machine translation from the Chinese translation.

      The result was hilarious, to the point that some guys decided to re-dub the whole movie with the bootleg text. You can watch it on YouTube, it has the official subtitles and the "Backstroke" subtitles. I recommend enabling the "Backstroke" subtitles as even the opening text has the funny bootleg translation.

  4. It's 2019, and automatic translations are still crap, especially if you don't translate to or from English.
    If you try to translate between German and Hungarian, for example, at least one very well known translator software seems to translate to English first, and then translate to the target language. Which leads to some very funny sentences, mind you...

  5. So for those who may not know, the word “cobbler” has two meanings in English. One is a person that makes shoes, and the other is a dessert similar to pie. Once I was looking up the Spanish word for the dessert cobbler with Google translate. However, even when I added context that I was referring to the dessert cobbler, this is what I got, “ El zapatero que estoy comiendo es delicioso.” The shoemaker that I am eating is delicious. Glad I know some basic Spanish.