Thursday, February 15, 2007

Fun with Google Translate

Pappy In Snow, 20070214We had a sloppy little sleetstorm yesterday, so what better opportunity to mess with Google Translate?

In English:
See this splendid photo of Pappy playing in the snow? He is running around like a lunatic. Pappy acts as crazy as a squirrel in a bag full of nuts when he frolics in the cold.

Now let's translate to German:
Dieses herrliche Foto von Pappy sehen, im Schnee zu spielen? Er läuft herum wie ein verrücktes. Pappy dient als verrückt wie ein Eichhörnchen in einem Beutel voll der Nüsse, wenn er in die Kälte scherzt.

Back to English:
This wonderful photo of Pappy see to play in the snow? It runs around like a crazy. Pappy serves as moved like a squirrel in a bag fully the Nüsse, if he jokes into cold weather.

On to Korean:
Pappy의 이 경이롭 사진은 눈에서 놀 것을 보는가? 그것은 미친 것 같이 주변에 달린다. Pappy는 Nüsse를 부대에 있는 다람쥐 같이 완전히 이동하는으로 그가 추운 기후로 농담하는 경우에, 봉사한다.

And back to English again:
Pappy these wonderments [lop] does the photograph see the glow thing from the eye? It going mad runs together in circumference. Pappy Nüsse the squirrel which to the unit is together completely moves jokes in case, serves with the cold weather he.

7 comments:

H.A. Turbofire, Sibertarian said...

My Human thought she was the only one to do this sort of thing!

Tierre Williams said...

Personally, I use AltaVista Babelfish (babelfish.altavista.com)for translation. Their widget is on the sidebar of my blog.

Anonymous said...

Lost in the roundings of translations. Lots of fun to be had for all... well, not all, just those with a certain sense of amusement.

Texas's Dad.

Nat said...

Turbo and Tex,
The perfect pastime for people with time burning a hole in their pockets. Kind of like blogging.

Tierre,
I'll have to see if the results are any different from Babelfish. I gave up on Altavista when their search engine went in the crapper.

Roxie, Sammy, Andy and Shermie said...

LOL ... Mom has used Babblefish but has not tried to translate back. Something new for her to do to waste time instead of paying complete attention to us ...

Roxie, Sammy & Andy

Charlie said...

As I recall, Robert Heinlein suggested that translation to Russian & back of "the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" would produce "the wine is good, but the meat is spoiled". And that was in the days before computer translation. Great fun!

Nat said...

Dachsies,
Glad we were able to give you some counterproductivity tips.

Charlie,
Unfortunately, in practice the phrase made the return trip from Russian without incident. But in the return trip from Korean on Babelfish it turned to "the spirit puts out the flag and does, the flesh omits but."