Thursday, August 06, 2009

Lost in translation

You should check out Translation Party. You enter a phrase or sentence in English, and the site translates the phrase into Japanese, then back into English, then back into Japanese, and so on until an "equilibrium" is achieved.

I entered the sentence, "I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other," which is the first sentence of the great American novel Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs. By the time Translation Party had reached equilibrium, the sentence had been reduced to, "I speak to other people's business."

Makes me wonder if the folks who screwed with the subtitles of Let the Right One In used a Swedish to English to Japanese version of Translation Party . . .

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