Comments on: "Fresh Prince of Bel Air" theme song, Google-Translated

By: girth

girth — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 21:53:00 +0000

Mark Twain did it first. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Celebrated_Jumping_Frog_of_Calaveras_County#Translations

By: monstrinho

monstrinho — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 11:24:00 +0000

nice idea but i could sit though the horribly douchey presentation. God that was unwatchable.

By: Andrew B.

Andrew B. — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 06:20:00 +0000

Thanks!

By: Joe Breig

Joe Breig — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 03:46:00 +0000

The reason Cinderella has a glass slipper is that when the story was translated from French, the word for fur was mistaken fo the word for glass.

By: ImaginaBit Empresa

ImaginaBit Empresa — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 02:31:00 +0000

I love the song “A determined mistique” of Hidrogenesse, which is a machine translation of an interview with Morrissey
Last year they made a new version for the album “A binary digit iffy. Recital for Alan Turing”

can be seen on youtube in Spanish, not subtitled: (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wt1Wxb53uaI&list=UUCSnTb2s–AqyFvDl06zyYg

By: flickerKuu

flickerKuu — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 21:51:00 +0000

One take THAT time, doesn’t mean they didn’t try multiple takes until the got it right. I thought the whole thing was kind of MEH myself. Pretty much every single phone message I get on google voice has a transcription that’s funnier than this. Oh well. At least they tried. Bravo to that.

By: Bottle Imp

Bottle Imp — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 21:33:00 +0000

Translation Party uses the Google Translate API to translate a phrase from English to Japanese and back again until the resulting output ceases changing. In an admission that probably reveals a great deficiency in my character, I enjoy putting the opening lines of novels into Translation Party.

The opening of Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton is: “I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.” But on the other end of TP you get: “When it happens, is a slightly different story from the stories of ordinary people.”

The opening of The Old Man and the Sea (“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.”) resolves to “80 Had a stream arrest 4, his boat Bay.”

Not always funny or interesting, but what can I say, I have a problem.

By: Luther Blissett

Luther Blissett — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 21:09:00 +0000

Might also be a two-part character where only one part is translated (or translated correctly) back to english. After all, hanzias well as kanji are quite… pictorial.

Plus, I am also amazed. Tried this in, ahem, 1999, I seem to recall, with the AltaVista Babelfish. Funniest was translating “Road Trippin’” to Korean and back. (Now I would have to look up when the Bablefish learned Korean…) Best subsitute lines ever. Somewhere, somthing always invoked a dragon. And a lot of food, mainly rice. My absulute favorite line was “The military disciplin is an unavoidable green onion”. I LOVE babbling this every now and then. Some of my former flatmates take this as my second signature line…

By: Jeremy Kalgreen

Jeremy Kalgreen — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 20:48:00 +0000

Yeah, I think it says how far our ability to machine translate language has come. It seems like not too long ago if you played this sort of game you’d get total gibberish after just one translate and back.

By: cjporkchop

cjporkchop — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 19:57:00 +0000

Yes.

By: Incipient Madness

Incipient Madness — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 19:51:00 +0000

”Apricot” worked it’s in so early I thought it must have been in the original and was just some late 80′s slang term I missed. I took a long break from TV in the mid to late 80′s and never watched much after that, so I didn’t know better.

Anyone have any ideas how “apricot” got in there. I’d wager it’s something like Backstroke of the West, a confusion of Chinese characters used to transliterate a foreign word with the words those characters represent in Mandarin.

By: Andrew B.

Andrew B. — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 19:04:00 +0000

not entirely sure what is happening.

By: Dan Hibiki

Dan Hibiki — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 19:00:00 +0000

it’s a pretty old trope.
So old that Philip K. Dick described a game in Galactic Pot-Healer(published 1969), where players would use a computer to translate book titles to Japanese and back again and try to guess what the original title was.Prior to that I would wager that gentelment had peasant try to spell book titles and decifer what the original word is.

By: Robert Drop

Robert Drop — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 18:43:00 +0000

It occurs to me that they could have ended up with these results in a single step if they had used Youtube’s closed captioning system.

By: jowlsey

jowlsey — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 18:36:00 +0000

http://translationparty.com

By: Sagodjur

Sagodjur — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 18:35:00 +0000

I used to do this with poetry to generate unexpected phrasing and usage of tenses. = I do this with hair generate unexpected formulas and use of time.

It doesn’t always work out well.

By: Leo

Leo — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 18:31:00 +0000

That was actually pretty good for being done in one take.

By: Sam Ley

Sam Ley — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 18:28:00 +0000

I’m actually surprised by how WELL it works. Up through the first 10 languages or so the result is actually largely intelligible. It is a bit strange sounding (apricot seems to worm it’s way into the translation almost immediately), but entirely usable.

By: theophrastvs

theophrastvs — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 18:01:00 +0000

Not the most original “it’s funny when computers try to translate (human language)”: http://www.snopes.com/language/misxlate/machine.asp …but certainly one that comes so close to political incorrectness (‘incorrectitude’?)

By: lysdexia

lysdexia — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 17:57:00 +0000

Am I the only one who cannot understand a word of what is going on here?

By: xzzy

xzzy — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 17:56:00 +0000

Seems like a decent option for writing new lyrics. Write a mundane essay about going to the store and buying some milk, translate it 60 times, then sing it. Suddenly everyone’s congratulating you on how your song saved their marriage and ended crime.