Chinese Whispers

I’ve been playing with Babelfish trying to see what happens when you run a phrase through it multiple times. Right now I work on versioning learning content into Irish from English, so the whole translation process fascinates me. We have particular problems with colloquial phrases and idioms that just don’t translate well.

One I had recently was “athas an domhan”, which is a way of describing extreme happiness (athas), the phrase “Bhi athas an domhan orm” was translated as “The happiness of the world is upon me” which is just a crude nonsense that means nothing in English and doesn’t do justice to the English. I think the closest translation of the phrase is “I was over the moon” even though there is no mention of moon in the Irish phrase, just the word “domhan”, which means world [as in the best record shop name ever from world music shop in Dublin (now deceased): Boogie an Domhan - Boogie of the World/Boogie on down].

So much punctuation. Anyway. I put the phrase “over the moon” into Babelfish and started translating it based on the following rules:

1. start in English
2. choose first language to translate to from English
3. in second language choose first language to translate to
4. continue to always translate to the first language option from any given language
5. on second and subsequent times using a particular language, choose the first language you have not yet used from that language (when selecting what to translate to next)
6. if the language you are to choose is the language you just translated from, choose the next available language
7. move back to language you just came from if no other option
8. end on English

I guess that makes no sense, but I knew what I was doing.

Here is a recording of me saying (with dodgy French and German and woefully inadequate Dutch) the words as they came up.

Over the moon

At one point the Dutch word “maan”, which I believe means “moon” was translated into English as “maan”. Once that happened there was no way out of the spiral, in all other languages the “English” word “maan” was translated as maan, presumably the default is to leave an unrecognised word as it is.

20 January 2007 | music | Comments