A similarly unintentional comedy in translation was a book I found several years ago that I believe was an autotranslation: "How to Good-bye Depression: If You Constrict Anus 100 Times Everyday. Malarkey? or Effective Way?". The amazon reviews are similarly hilarious.
I have a copy of this! I found it in a used bookstore years ago and had to grab it.
I'm pretty sure it's not auto-translated: like the sibling said, the first half-ish of the book is a verbatim collection of Usenet posts of the author, from 1999, writing in his characteristic broken English, earnestly laying out his anus-constricting theories while getting mildly trolled.
The rest of it is a screed in the same style. Opening to a random page (really, didn't have to look for samples), we see
> Besides shooting out a big blank from your buttock, you can feel as if your root chakra leaked sweet hot mucus. You can feel your root chakra as if it were an exciting womb. Cabala says "human being could have lived on the earth of high temperature long ago years as a human being of immaterial hermaphrodite". I think there has been the imprint of immaterial hermaphrodite in our physical body.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure it's closer to Time Cube via English as a second language than bad/autotranslation per se - as far as I can tell it was originally written in English as there doesn't appear to be anything with a similar title in Japanese by anyone with that name, and there's a fair amount of common English-written-by-Japanese-speakers grammatical errors and other smells.
That's crazy, according to the reviews the first 90 pages are also just usenet conversations where people are making fun of the author who apparently just copy-pasted the conversations into the book.
I tried doing that ten times in a succession and it’s hard. Can someone please explain shortly the essence of this method? Or what’s the joke is, at least.
Seems to work along the same principles as yoga. Strengthening of the root chakra if you're familiar with the lingo. If you're not familiar with a system like that, there's probably no short version.
An interesting cultural phenomenon is taking place because of automated translation services like Google Translate. I learned of it in another thread on HN a few months ago. People are realizing that what they write will be translated by machine and are adjusting their written language accordingly. This is one of those interesting side effects of tech on culture that is not immediately obvious, I think.
It's basically an extension of "international English" which avoids things like phrasal verbs or coloquialisms, but more from the standpoint of, "If my coworker in Shenzhen puts this text into Google Translate and tries to create documentation from it, is it going to sound ridiculous?" And then doing a few translate/reverse-translate passes yourself until you've tweaked the text enough so the input and output is the same. Eventually, you start writing this way by default.
This could be considered the same as telegram abbreviations, or even text-speak like "LOL" or whatever, but the key in this instance is we're changing our way of communicating based on what a computer can understand, not a fellow human.
> People are realizing that what they write will be translated by machine and are adjusting their written language accordingly.
Machine translation is becoming part of foreign-language education, too. In Japan, some teachers of English have started introducing their students to MT and showing them how to use it to communicate better in English. One technique for a native Japanese speaker to use MT when writing English is to modify the Japanese input so that it is translated more accurately. For example, subjects are often omitted from Japanese sentences when they can be understood from the context, and MT regularly mistranslates such sentences; the English output improves if all subjects are made explicit in the Japanese input.
The use of MT in foreign-language education, however, makes some educators and students uncomfortable, as it is not yet known whether reliance on MT when studying a foreign language hinders, helps, or has no effect on long-term language acquisition.
A paper discussing these and related issues is here:
You've misunderstood the parent. He's not suggesting that you speak in order to attain some predicted Google Translate output, but instead it's helpful to use precise language that doesn't rely on a shared contextual understanding.
For example, you'd use the phrase "upload it to the server" rather than "put it on the server" - the verb "upload" is unambiguous and lets both the recipient and the translation software know that "server" is referring to a computer system.
I hope this is not too off-topic, but I really wish there were more (excellent) “literal translations”.
Yes: it would be tricky and unpalatable for much of the audience, but I personally find it fascinating to get in to the “mind” of a language and would like the opportunity without having to memorize (something I find particularly challenging) the “words” of a language.
I've spent a considerable amount subtitling a TV series, and there were subtitles floating around for it before I started, but they contained a ton of bad English; wrong idioms, and wrong word order.
But when I did my translation, I tried to stick to the word order and expressions of the original language when possible. You could translate each sentence to the most likely way an English-speaking person would express themselves, but can also stray a bit, pick something that's closer to the original, but still works. I wanted to subtly remind people that they're not in Kansas anymore. Even though the show is a teen high school drama, it's absolutely not an American high school, so you can't use words associated with that either.
One example from the French remake: In English, a conventional piece of dialogue goes "I love you" - "I love you too".
But in French, that dialogue goes "Je t'aime" - "Moi aussi". So in this case we actually picked "Me too" as the translation for that, which definitely sticks out, but comes across as a little bit of a teaching French moment, because you can clearly hear that the character isn't saying "Je t'aime aussi".
That's kinda what you were looking for, right?
However, somewhere there is a line, across which lies a sea of Bad English, and even further from that line, you get the incomprehensible gibberish of the work in the article, and you really, really don't want to end up there.
"But in French, that dialogue goes "Je t'aime" - "Moi aussi". So in this case we actually picked "Me too" as the translation for that, which definitely sticks out, but comes across as a little bit of a teaching French moment, because you can clearly hear that the character isn't saying "Je t'aime aussi"."
true! and to be honest, also the first one isn't probably meaning "je t'aime" at all
There's multiple translations of the closing dialog in Breathless. (Of course, even the English title isn't a literal translation of À bout de souffle—that would be Out of Breath.)
That's a pretty cool example of how some pieces of dialogue are just untranslateable.
There's a common misconception among a lot of people, and definitely among the HN crowd, that there exists a good translation for every sentence in every language to every other language. I remember some articles a year ago or so here about how Google Translate had supposedly created some kind of internal language through its ML algorithms and data.
Yeah, but no. Google Translate would completely fail on that dialogue from Out of Breath, and if you were relying on it, you wouldn't even know it had failed!
I'm in the skeptical camp when it comes to literal translations - I don't think it shows the "mind" of the source language. If anything, I think it has the opposite effect of losing the forest in search of trees, or making phrases unnecessarily more "exotic" than they originally are.
E.g., if I say in Korean that I've become "green onion kimchi", I'm not picturing green onion kimchi in my mind. (I don't even particularly like green onion kimchi.) I'm saying I'm dead tired. When I say "my nose is three feet", I'm not picturing my face being deformed like Pinocchio - I'm saying I'm in no situation to help another.
In cases like that it would be up to me as the fascinated viewer to dig in to those idioms. It would be helped with a translator’s notes of course, but I would expect it to take a little extra time and effort to watch a show like that.
At the end in your example, I feel like I would have a deeper understanding of kimchi as it relates to Korean speakers, how “green onion kimchi” is different, and why that means someone is dead tired.
Then, next time it comes up I would understand it a little better due to slightly different context.
> At the end in your example, I feel like I would have a deeper understanding of kimchi as it relates to Korean speakers, how “green onion kimchi” is different, and why that means someone is dead tired.
Picture this situation in reverse. If you were instead a Korean person, digging in to why Americans associate cats and dogs with heavy rain? Or why English speakers eat butterflies before they do something on stage?
Learning idioms is useful and interesting, but I agree with the other commenter that you shouldn't look to an idiom to gain cultural insight.
Maybe I’m the odd one out, but as a native english speaker I also find english idioms to be interesting and to speak volumes about the person saying them.
“Raining cats and dogs” I had not looked up before, but I don’t hear it much currently so I would likely associate it with someone of a specific older age range, or someone younger who’s been around (or who is emulating) older people. Even that small inference brings some depth to understanding what someone is saying, and the character of the person saying it.
As for “butterflies in my stomach”, that’s even more important as it’s a tactile expression, describing the feeling of nerves as though there were literal butterflies fluttering lightly in one’s stomach. The fact that at some point an english speaker decided to express the internal feeling as though it was something tangible that other people around them were familiar with, that’s (imo) some pretty fascinating cultural context and something that I see repeated throughout english. I also suspect that it happens in many (but importantly not all) other languages/cultures, which is also pretty fascinating.
Many expressions and idioms like that are so goddamn old that they exist in most European languages: "Schmetterlinge im Bauch", "Papillons dans le ventre", "Fjärilar i magen", "Mariposas en el estómago", "Fluturi In Stomac", etc.
> Reproducing the texts' often fragmentary formulations without augmentation or correction, he has produced a pitilessly literal translation, one that captures the texts' impenetrability and unfinished quality while awakening readers to an uncanniness that often lies hidden beneath doctrinal layers.
If you're stoked for that, then I would be remiss to not say something about Robert Alter's one man translation of the Hebrew Bible.
From wiki: "Alter's translation aims to convey the literary style of the original Hebrew text in English, recreating as much as possible its poetic rhythms and metaphors"
I think many of the Psalms and Ecclesiastes in particular are more beautifully rendered in his translation
It’s up for conjecture how “pitilessly literal” the DBH translation is. As is the case with most translations, he imports his own agenda (particularly with regard to his universalist soteriology). It’s good, but it’s also not as “pitilessly” objective as he may believe it to be.
This might not have been common in the past but it isn't a new thing. I know my dad had a copy of the new testament that had the original Greek on one line and a word by word translation on the next. Not the most readable translation or layout but interesting if you wanted to get closer to the original writing.
An interesting case of this is the localization of the original Pokémon games. Before they were released officially in North America by Nintendo, a group of Chinese software pirates "translated" them into English first and sold them. The official translation came out later. Needless to say the unofficial translation is totally screwy in a hilarious way. What's even more interesting though is that it's a hyper-literal translation, so things that were localized out in Nintendo's translation (alcohol, death, gambling) are presented in full glory. Team Rocket is known as "The Regiment of the Guided Missile" and the Pokédex is known as "the illustrated handbook of PET," spelled out fully every time. Pokémon are referred to as PETs in general. There's an item called sulfuric acid.
I had a great time playing it and noting the differences/absurd translations with my friends.
Since words don't have a one-to-one mapping or anything--even in cases where the mapping of words themselves makes sense (and if often doesn't, as words in language say have different attachments for how to convey meaning)--this is still mostly a subjective translation problem; if you want to come close to this I recommend playing with apps like Pleco (for Chinese) that are designed to give you the source text in the original language and then let you click each word to get a dictionary definition (in your language) for each word (which of course isn't a single word and can't be, which is the problem with trying to get a "literal" translation). (I think Google Translate might have a mode like this?)
If you're trying to learn a language, use the Assimil books.
They have the target language on the left side and usually both a literal and an easy-to-understand translation on the same height of the page on the right side.
Sometimes with explanations as to where the expression comes from.
Also: very little grammar (only to the extended needed, nothing upfront)
Best books I ever found for learning languages.
I have no affiliation, but learnt 2 languages to B2/C1 level with their help.
The proper word for such translations, by the way, is "calque".
Another famous calque is "groudhog", which comes from the Dutch aardvark. Yes, the two animals are completely unrelated: the Dutch referred to them both as aardvark though, and only one of them got calqued into English.
There isn't much of a mind of the language with such matters.
They are idioms and quite often native speakers do not actually realize what they are saying when they use them.
I remember that when I gained more proficiency at Finnish, that many Finns remarked that I was teaching them because I was manually analyzing what was actually literally being said and they never quite considered what they were saying.
Consider that many English speakers when they are saying “God damn it.” they are really not realizing that “God” is the subject, “damn” is the finite verb in the subjunctive mood, and “it” is the direct object, thus expressing a wish that God damn it, whatever “it” might be. — it is an indivisible idiom for them which is also why it is often spelt as one word.
Especially because the subjunctive mood is rarely used as such to express a wish in modern English.
I agree with your point about idioms many times being used without awareness of what they “actually” mean, and while I would still say it’s interesting for me to hear/see the idiom anyway, it’s not really the meat of where the “mind” is to me.
There are dozens of examples I can think of, such as how people refer to themselves and to others (Japanese is especially interesting here), how people communicate spatial relationships/directions, and how people refer to body parts (calf in Portuguese literally translates as “potato of the leg”).
It’s said that our language shapes how we think, and just the barest glimpse I’ve seen in to “literal” translations gives me a window in to not only how that’s true, but how particular languages can shape particular thought patterns.
> There are dozens of examples I can think of, such as how people refer to themselves and to others (Japanese is especially interesting here), how people communicate spatial relationships/directions, and how people refer to body parts (calf in Portuguese literally translates as “potato of the leg”).
The last one is surely an idiom, and the other parts are the ones that are often hard to translate literally.
I wouldn't say that “the honorable front” as a translation would really do justice to the meaning of /omae/ in Japanese and how it differs from, say, /anata/. “the honorable front” is the literal meaning of /omae/, but it's again an idiom that Japanese speakers scarcely realize the origins of, though Japanese's ideographic spelling perhaps would serve to make speakers more aware of such origins.
I recently finished "Control", and there's a major character who speaks significantly in finish idioms that were directly translated: "I can tell you are not a yesterday's grouse's son"[1] I definitely got most of it from context; "take them behind the sauna" isn't that different from "Take them out back", and it was a fun way to make the character "weird" (which is important for story reasons)
For fr/en, author Jean-Loup Chiflet has written a few books consisting entirely of what you're describing. The most famous is "Sky My Husband (dictionary of the running English)"
Interestingly, at least in the wikipedia examples, the literal translation is not even really literal. For instance, "As paredes têm ouvidos." literal translation is "The walls have ears". It's fascinating that they translated to "The walls have hearsay." I think that's an artefact from the initial Portuguese -> French translation.
That book is more like getting a phrase translate into a chain of languages and see what it comes out in the other side.
You are thinking about foreignization, which is more common (but still not really common) in the translation of literary fictions than that of subtitles. I think most movies don't do that because they target casual audience who is not ready to consume too much foreignization.
Well, one more example for the TV show I spent time translating: It's a teen high school drama, but it's a Norwegian high school, not an American high school. The characters have all just started high school, but during your first year in Norway, you and your classmates will vary in age from 15-16-17, and high school lasts three years, not four.
If you use "freshmen" to describe them, you get the "new at school" aspect, but viewers will get the completely wrong idea about their age. If you use "juniors", you get the age aspect right, but their role and social standing at school would be completely off.
So in a case like that, domesticating the translation simply doesn't work, you'd get super confused as a viewer if you use American high school terms. So you have to foreignize it, you have to call them something else, and you have to make up new terms when translating the various Norwegian derogatory terms for first-year students that exist.
For what it's worth, "freshman" is American, and the related British/Australian/NZ term "fresher" only applies to first year students in their first weeks at university - not at schools.
I'm glad you didn't use the word. It would seem really out of place.
In England, we just said "6th year" (cf Harry Potter), "lower sixth" or "Year 12", depending on how old fashioned the school was.
And "first-grader" is something completely different, those are six years old, not sixteen, so that was completely out. Plenty of traps and completely inappropriate translations as well.
I ended up using "first-year", "second-year" and "third-year", and "firstie" for when older students were looking down on them.
I think this is a good example of a time when even the “general audience” is best served by using a “foreignization”, or even by just using the original word with some notes as to what that means.
You see this in anime and manga translations- the source of the “translator’s note: kekatu means plan” - as they try to get across the information not carried in the words themselves.
I have never understood why Chinese companies often have such hilariously bad English translations of their product instructions. Often the product quality is pretty good and the illustrations in the instructions are fine. But the English translation is terrible. There must be millions of Chinese people that speak decent English (in Hong Kong alone).
It's not an explanation, but I know enough people who are convinced that they actually speak proper English, but most of the time it turns into grammatical gibberish, and they fail to realize that even when you point it out. If you're one of those people and think you are up for the job, and noone else proof-reads what you are actually doing... maybe this would result in this kind of instruction manual?
A Chinese guy I knew was studying for the TOEFL test and was memorizing all kinds of medical terms I'd never heard about, and yet, when he said goodbye he'd also say "I go first". At that time I had no idea why he did it, but as I learned more Mandarin it became clear that he just translated the phrase 我先走 (lit. I first go) which is very common when parting ways.
Point being, many study for tests but can't speak English.
"many study for tests but can't speak English." This is definitely true at least from my student days a long long while ago. However that particular perception, that english learners tend to translate what sounds natural in their language to an English equivalent, is a bit of a mystery to me.
I don't want to sound bragging, but I never translate languages in my head. If I do that it will feel like the equivalent of database searching with a query, I feel exhausted if I have to look for something phrase by phrase (or matching). I admit that when I'm writing or organising thoughts I have to go over words so searching does happen.
Is "I go first" a correct translation? If so, why is it used? As an excuse that you have to leave earlier than the person you have been with? Or to avoid that uncomfortable situation where both parties aren't sure if it is time to leave, and are just standing around awkwardly?
When you see these things in foreign languages, it may seem odd. However, if you look at the origins of words and phrases in English, it is also full of odd expressions. It is just that you are used to them.
Take "welcome."[1] Well come. You've arrived well. You make a good entrance? Not a ridiculous thing to say when someone arrives.
What about in response to "Thank you?" You are welcome.[2] Huh? What does that mean?
Or, "you are welcome to take a second cookie." How does that translate into "I do not mind if you take a second cookie?"
[1] Welcome translates quite literally in other European languages. For example, in French, it is bienvenue - bien: well - venu: came.
[2] On the other hand, it is much more common to say de rien (in French) or de nada (in Spanish): literally, "it's nothing."
The origin of "welcome" seems to be "will come", not "well come". This is clear from the German version "Willkommen", which is closer to the original proto-germanic "wiljakumo" and is directly related to the rather dated German expression "Will [er/sie] kommen!" ("Let him/her in, or "Will he/she come [in]!"), or even to English "will ya come!". The connection of "will" and "come" signals the desire to receive the guest.
The french "bienvenue" seems to be a too-literal translation from wiljakumo [0]. A similar construction is missing in Latin.
It is! I’ve been watching a bunch of Asian TV shows lately and I’ve seen that phrase crop up in both Thai and Taiwanese shows. I had the same question so I asked a friend who’s Thai about it. She said it’s equivalent to “I should get going”, “I’m going to head out”, or something of that nature.
That underscores something about languages. They don't actually map 1:1 to each other. Whatever "I go first" means to speakers of Mandarin, we might only be able to approximate what that means in English.
An example that comes to mind is the oversimplification that happens when people say that the word "aloha" means "hello" and "goodbye". It only sort of does because that's how it is sometimes used. Really it's a whole concept that is unique to Hawaiian culture that would more accurately translate to "beloved" or "cherished".
This is just something that I read somewhere so don't take it at face value, maybe someone who knows the issue better can confirm or deny it. But I remember reading that in Asian countries like China and Japan, they tend to base the selection of translators on knowledge of the source language, not the target. That is, they get the translator with the best knowledge of Chinese even if their English is broken.
So is this basically saying that a grammatically incorrect, but factually correct translation is better than a grammatically perfect, but factually incorrect (as the source text was not understood) translation?
Finnish and Japanese language education focuses extensively on grammatical correctness and students get faulted for making grammatical mistakes.
In the Netherlands, correct grammar is only a small part of the final score, and what is given far more weight is how well one is able to understand the speaker and convey one's thoughts to the listener, and far more emphasis is placed on practicing conversations, even though they not be grammatically sound, which in Finland would be considered walking before having learned to crawl, but it seems to work.
There was an early translation program in China that was both popular and notoriously bad. For example, the simplified character 干 has a number of meanings, most commonly "dry", but the program would always pick "fuck" -- the end result being supermarket aisles with signs saying "Fuck Goods" and restaurants offering dishes like "Duck Fuck Noodles". Engrish.com (sic) has a whole category for these:
>They just put the text in a local equivalent to Google Translate and that's it, no proofreading etc.
I guess that is what they must be doing. But I still don't quite understand why they would spend thousands of dollars creating a product, tooling, packaging, instructions etc and then not spend, what, ~$100 getting a half-way decent translation.
I love the English language and I have a deep fear that this is the final destination for our language; that given demographics it will start to permanently reflect Mandarin translationisms, at least in the workplace. So many code reviews and design docs I deal with now are full of missing articles and tenses. I try to help with corrections but it can honestly start to feel like you're a big jerk in a code review if you're constantly correcting people's English.
It can be done better or worse - some of the best advice I got for teaching ESL was that if someone uses incorrect grammar, to simply repeat the clause with correct grammar and a 'go on?' tone. Immediate, low-friction feedback is one of the best ways to learn, what makes people think you're a jerk is if you call attention to their mistakes.
Of course, that's much easier in conversation than written communication. A good reason to make small talk with your co-workers.
I think they tend to be more expensive and thin in the ground in mainland China - Hong Kongers or native English speakers. That said Google translate does quite a decent job.
Google translate is just as humorous and reasonably similar. eg:
Este lago parece-me bem piscoso. Vamos pescar para nos divertirmos.
Google -> This lake looks very fishy to me. Let's go fishing for fun.
English as She is Spoke -> That pond it seems me many multiplied of fishes. Let us amuse rather to the fishing.
English version -> This lake looks full of fish. Let's have some fun fishing.
> Mark Twain said of English as She Is Spoke that "Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect."[6]
Maybe a weekend playing with gpt-3 will prove otherwise.
"To craunch a marmoset, it may take less than two hours. But a brindle should be done within five."
"You mistake you! It is a frog. It is one of the most powerful of the edible frogs,' Jadon said as he dragged its body slowly toward the throne."
"That pond it seems me many multiplied of fishes. Let us amuse rather to the fishing. This fish filled with colors, motion. O green and smooth, It move a high spiral."
Random anecdote: in 2005, when "all your base" was still in peak meme, I happened to be in Kuta Square in Bali with a friend when Jemaah Islamiyah blew up one of their devices. Rattled but unharmed and unclear on what exactly had just happened, we returned to our hotel and watched TV news. Once the penny dropped, the following dialogue ensued:
"piscoso" is a very specific term (if I google that I get just dictionary entries, almost no actual use). Replacing it with "cheio de peixe" (full of fish) would make the translation much easier
For those with an afternoon to burn, check of Star War The Third Gathers: Backstroke of the West, a fan dub of a poor roundtrip translation of The Revenge of the Sith: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XziLNeFm1ok. It’s filled with gems of this type.
Related: a long time ago, in a country far away where I grew up, I had a videotape of Star Wars with Spanish subtitles. It was awful. I think it was done by someone who didn't understand much English and knew nothing of Star Wars. I don't have that masterpiece anymore (nor a VCR player, for that matter), but off the top of my head:
- They translated "Millenium Falcon" as "Numidian Flot". "She can outrun imperial starships" somehow became "it made two imperial starships run away".
- Chewie was Yuri.
- Near the beginning, Vader says something like "send a distress signal, and inform the senate that everyone on board was killed". The translation meant "send a distress signal, gather the senate, and kill everyone".
- Near the end, Luke is doing the trench run, Vader shoots and misses, and says "the force is strong in this one". The translation meant "what a strange swinging motion".
As an Indian who is currently living in USA, how do I talk English like the white people? I try but fall short and my jokes are an embarrassment. I dream of one day talking like the white people. But my existence is lonely as no white person invite me home.
I've heard that watching a lot of American television shows can be effective. I think that can help you get familiar with commonly used slang, cultural values, typical patterns of behavior. Also, it would be essential to practice in real life, by interacting as much as possible with the "natives".
When I was talking , someone said that I talk like I am reading a book. Is spoken English different from written English in books? All English I know is from reading text books in school and college.
It can be. Dialogue tends to take shortcuts to make it shorter, to have run on sentences, and to use some colloquialisms not often found in books. I think watching people communicate in TV and movies is a reasonable recommendation, but you'll likely have to tone down the drama :)
EDIT: Also podcasts or talk shows, potentially. I had this problem with German and I solved it by going to bars and chatting with people, but that's not super possible these days.
I highly recommend the book “The cow went to the swamp”. It is illustrations of Portuguese sayings paired with literal English translations.
If you speak Portuguese, it is precious. If you don’t, it is so bizarre you cannot help but laugh.
Literal translations of phrases from Greek to English language is a whole joke category in Greek. We even translate single compound words, eg πολυέλαιος (=chandelier) to 'much oil' (έλαιον=oil)
https://www.amazon.com/How-Good-bye-Depression-Constrict-Eve...