Foreign language was my Achilles' heel in high school—to the point I began to come up with excuses to opt out of the class. Just before the first test in my ninth grade French class, I told the teacher that the school's foreign language requirement was against my religion. I explained that Man had tried to build the Tower of Babel, a challenge to God's superiority, and the LORD promptly responded to our arrogance by confusing men with various languages to prevent further collaboration. I said that my attempts to circumvent divine punishment by actually learning other languages was an affront to God. I informed that teacher that, while her desire to teach me to communicate with other cultures seemed well-intentioned, the school’s position on the matter was a violation of my religious freedom.
She didn't buy it. I had to take the test like everybody else.
Fortunately for me, I live in a culture where essentially everybody speaks only one language fluently. Hence a common joke you’ll hear if you do much traveling in Europe:
Q: What do you call a person who speaks two languages?
A: Bilingual.
Q: What do you call a person who speaks three languages?
A: Trilingual.
What do you call a person who speaks only one language?
[beat]
A: American.
And you know what? They’ve got us. Most education systems around the world teach students to communicate fluently in at least one language in addition to their own. One may cite the growing presence of English as a universal language as reason not to care about learning another. I think we're just lazy as a country, but that's a blog for another time.
One tool that may be helpful for Americans (or may possibly make us more lazy) is the number of instant text translators available online. Here's just one I found. They're incredibly simple to use. You just type in a phrase, select the languages "translating from" and "translating into" from a drop-down menu, and click enter. Presto. It spits out the expression in a different tongue. This highly-useful and possibly-blasphemous resource is like having an electronic interpreter at the click of a button. However, they are far from perfect. Case in point:
Several years ago, a friend in my fantasy football league posted a message on our league board offering backhanded condolences when I was eliminated from the playoffs. More specifically, he was disappointed that I lost before he had the chance to eliminate me himself. My team name that year was Evil Empire, and I jokingly presented my team as though it were a cold war-era Soviet machine. Keeping that theme, my fellow league member used an online translator to post his message in Russian:
Хорошая попытка. Я хотел был бы бить вас снова.
Translation: "Nice try. I really wanted to beat you again." But I only know this for sure because he confirmed it later. See, I don't speak fluent Russian—shocking, I know—so initially I tried to use the online translator to change the Russian back to English. I copied and pasted it exactly, and this is what came out:
"Good attempt. I wanted would be to beat you again."
Huh? That’s…interesting. Not surprisingly, the online text translator has some limitations. Most human interpreters will tell you there’s no such thing as an exact translation, anyway. It’s like trying to reproduce a clay sculpture with paint on canvas: You can represent the original in a different medium, but you can’t duplicate it. A later French teacher told me that, conceptually, it was better to think of it as though I were translating ideas, not words. That's probably why I struggled with foreign language in general: My inclination was to translate a sentence mechanically piece-by-piece, as if I were decoding a word puzzle.
Of course, it doesn’t work that way. And while the online text translators are more competent than most high-school freshmen, they still follow a finite set of grammatical and linguistic rules without any human discretion. So there's obviously going to be some bugs.
…Which means that if you try to translate a phrase from English, into another language, and then back to English, weird stuff happens—and hilarity may ensue. I decided to run a few test phrases through the translator to see what it would give me. I used the same English-to-Russian-back-to-English formula. The original is in bold, the translation in italics:
The quick red fox jumped over the lazy brown dog.
The fast red fox has jumped through a lazy brown dog.
I think I'll put these pants on.
I think, that I shall put on these trousers.
If it was God's intent that languages be a stumbling block to communication, rest assured that these translators don't pose any sort of challenge to His will. I ran a few holiday phrases that I thought might have some interesting results, this time using a few other languages as the intermediary:
Oh what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh!
Russian: About, on what entertainment it should go in the open sled with one horse!
French: Oh that entertainment he must take up the opened sleigh in a horse!
German: Oh which fun it should ride in an einspännigen open sledge!
(Then, to add another kink in the hose, I went English-Russian-German-French-Spanish):
On what pleasure this must go in the sledge opened with a horse!
Heh. I was one of those kids who can have more fun with a cardboard box than any toy that might've come in it, so this simple device is potentially hours of entertainment. I decided that Russian seemed to produce the best results, and I was too impatient to start funneling every phrase through four languages, so I stuck with the English-Russian-English route. Here's a few more:
They never let poor Rudolph play in any reindeer games.
They never allow Rudolf's poor game in any games of a reindeer.
Frosty the snowman was a jolly, happy soul.
The frosty yeti was cheerful, happy soul.
Grandma got run over by a reindeer.
To the grandmother the reindeer moved.
OhMY. I could spend days running stuff through this thing. I almost feel bad, using a tool meant for good to create linguistic abominations like some mad language scientist. And it has applications far outside of Christmas carols:
How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
How many, the marmot wood North American could throw, if the marmot wood North American could throw a wood?
Here's a few translated phrases for you sports fans out there. See if you can guess the original:
Arrive after me! I am a person! To me forty!
Bears - the one who we thought, that they were.
I could not care less if the command struggles. I wish to kiss you.
How about a few favorites from movie and TV land?
The assumption, what? I have received a fever, and the unique instruction - it is more than handbell on a neck of the cow!
You are going to have a plenty of time to roll dubis when you live in a van downwards at the river!
And for a finale, how about the infamous answer given by Miss Teen SC:
I personally believe, that the American Americans are unable to make so because, h'm, some people there in our nation have no cards and, mm, I believe, that ours, mm, formation as, type, mm, Southern Africa and, mm, Iraq and everywhere as, type, and I believe, that they should, mm, our formation here with the USA should help the USA, mm, should help Southern Africa and should help Iraq and the Asian countries, thus we are able to create our future.
I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, um, some people out there in our nation don't have maps and, uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as, uh, South Africa and, uh, the Iraq and everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should, uh, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, should help South Africa and should help Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future.
Yes, that was sneaky. I switched the original (italics) with the translation (bold). Be honest: Could you even tell?
So if you're looking to waste a little time over the next few days, and my blogs don't fit the bill, take the translator for a spin and see what twisted gems you can unearth.
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