Perhaps because I grew up bilingual, I have always been very fond of machine translation stories. I posted my favorite machine translation joke a long time ago, so I won't repeat it here. It's amusing, though, that real life now approximates my joke, as you see from the Lost in Translation web site:
What happens when an English phrase is translated (by computer) back and forth between 5 different languages? The authors of the Systran translation software probably never intended this application of their program. As of September 2003, translation software is almost good enough to turn grammatically correct, slang-free text from one language into grammatically incorrect, barely readable approximations in another. But the software is not equipped for 10 consecutive translations of the same piece of text. The resulting half-English, half-foreign, and totally non sequitur response bears almost no resemblance to the original. Remember the old game of “Telephone”? Something is lost, and sometimes something is gained. Try it for yourself!
It's not a true game of multilingual 'telephone' since it translates the phrase back into English before each iteration instead of being a true round-robin, but it's nevertheless amusing to see what happens when you take a phrase like “out of sight, out of mind” and run it through five different translations:
Here's the first try:
Original English Text:
Out of sight, out of mind.
Translated to French:
Hors de la vue, hors de l'esprit.
Translated back to English:
Out of the sight, of the spirit.
Translated to German:
Aus dem Anblick des Geistes heraus.
Translated back to English:
From the sight of the spirit out.
Translated to Italian:
Dalla vista dello spirito fuori.
Translated back to English:
From the sight of the spirit outside.
Translated to Portuguese:
Da vista do espírito fora.
Translated back to English:
Of the sight of the spirit it are.
Translated to Spanish:
De la vista del alcohol está.
Translated back to English:
Of the Vista of the alcohol it is.
Including Asian languages gets us even farther afield:
Original English Text:
Out of sight, out of mind.
Translated to Japanese:
?????????
Translated back to English:
From vision from heart.
Translated to Chinese:
???????
Translated back to English:
From version from heart.
Translated to French:
De la version du coeur.
Translated back to English:
Version of the heart.
Translated to German:
Version des Inneren.
Translated back to English:
Version of the inside.
Translated to Italian:
Versione della parte interna.
Translated back to English:
Version of the inner part.
Translated to Portuguese:
Versão da parte interna.
Translated back to English:
Version of the internal part.
Translated to Spanish:
Versión de la parte interna.
Translated back to English:
Version of the internal part.
