Zone38 Presents...
Letters to the World

31-May-2003

A light-light-light-light-hearted tale of mistranslation

Filed under: General — codeman38 @ 12:36 am

Heh. Discovered via an old Slashdot thread, and still not fixed by the Systran folks:

Try translating “Yoda had a light-saber fight in Episode Two” into French and back repeatedly via Babelfish.

Yoda had a light-saber fight in Episode Two.
Yoda a eu un combat de lumière-light-saber dans l’épisode deux.
Yoda had a combat of light-light-saber in the episode two.
Yoda a eu un combat de lumière-lumière-light-light-saber dans l’épisode deux.
Yoda had a combat of light-light-light-light-saber in the episode two.
Yoda a eu un combat de lumière-lumière-lumière-lumière-light-light-light-light-saber dans l’épisode deux.
Yoda had a combat of light-light-light-light-light-light-light-light-saber in the episode two.

Interestingly, this bug doesn’t occur if you spell it “light-sabre”. Go figure.

Also, reminiscent of the multilingual “rink” bug I mentioned a while back on my blog, if we stick only to translating from English to French and vice versa:

rink
patinoire
skating rink
patinoire de patinage
skating rink of ice-skating
patinoire de patinage du glace-patinage
skating rink of ice-skating of ice-ice-skating
patinoire de patinage du glace-patinage du glace-glace-patinage
skating rink of ice-skating of the ice-ice-skating of ice-ice-ice-skating
patinoire de patinage du glace-patinage du glace-glace-patinage du glace-glace-glace-patinage
skating rink of ice-skating of the ice-ice-skating of the ice-ice-ice-skating of ice-ice-ice-ice-skating

Having fun yet?

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Leave a comment

You can use these HTML tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

© 2001-2024 codeman38. Powered by WordPress.