How's That Again?

If you ever wonder why foreign relations are fraught with misunderstandings of the other guy’s meanings and motives, you need look no further than an online translation site. These sites, devised by experienced linguists, interpreters, and computer experts (one supposes), offer what people probably believe are accurate translations from one language to another.

While one hopes that the world’s diplomats do not rely upon these online services, such as Google Translate, Babelfish, and Worldlingo, many of them are hearing their fellow diplomats’ ideas filtered through the perhaps even less reliable interpreters who bring their own inadequacies and prejudices to on-the-spot instantaneous translation of complex world issues.  It’s no wonder that a few nuances may be lost in translation.

 

To test the efficacy of the online translators, I tried a little experiment with a couple of simple English children’s verses. To reflect the major languages spoken in the world, I translated each of them successively from English into Russian, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Italian, Spanish, French, and then back into English. Here are the results. I started one experiment with:

 

          Twinkle, twinkle, little star,

          How I wonder what you are,

          Up above the world so high,

          Like a diamond in the sky.

And ended up with:

        I turned,

            And I do not know how to do some of the stars,

            And a flash from the top of the world,

            Like diamonds.

For a second attempt, I started with: 

 

        Mary had a little lamb, 

        Its fleece was white as snow,

        And everywhere that Mary 

            went                               

        The lamb was sure to go.

 

The resulting translation, after going through eight other languages and then back into English was:

            Mary, Mary, was wherever he may be,

            Please go ahead,

            Lamb and wool in the snow,

            And pregnancy.

To test how the online translator would do with an actual current political statement, I chose one that has made the news rather recently, by one of the more bellicose presidential candidates, who said of ISIS: “I would carpet-bomb them into oblivion.”  That statement went through the translation process and emerged simply as:

“I had forgotten the bombing.”

Some other examples of translation fiascos can be found in my book, Puns, Puzzles and Word Play, including a surreal rendition of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

 Maybe the best diplomacy is just to keep your mouth shut.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou has never learned to keep his mouth shut and is resigned to the fact that he will never be Secretary of State.

                        

             Mary had a little lamb,

            Potatoes, and mint jelly,

            Pickles, slaw, and deviled ham

            She brought home from the deli.

           

            A tummy-ache made Mary weep.

            She cried, “How sick I am!”

            Then, like Bo-Peep, who lost her sheep,

            Mary lost her lamb.

Lost in Translation

Why Translation Matters is a new book by Edith Grossman, a noted translator of Spanish literature, most famous for Cervantes’ Don Quixote in 2003.  One of her theses is that fidelity to the original work demands that the translator avoid word-for-word literal translation and, in effect, create an entirely new piece of literature.

The pitfalls of literal translation can be easily seen by anyone who relies upon on-line translation services.  As an experiment filled with merriment, I used three different on-line services to translate a passage from English to Spanish; then using the word-for-word Spanish translation I asked the same service to translate it back to English.  The results differ markedly.

The original is an excerpt from one of Hamlet’s soliloquies: 

To be, or not to be, that is the question.  Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them. 

         

Alta Vista’s Babelfish, finishing in a distant third place, renders it thus:  

To be or not to be, that one is the question.  If he is noble in the mind to undergo the slings and you shoot with an arrow of the indignant fortune or to take the arms against a sea from hardships and being been against, terminate them.

ImTranslator gives us:  

To be or not to be, it is the question. If 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and the arrows of the scandalous fortune, or to take weapon against a sea of problems, and contravening, finish them.

           

Only Google came up with an English-Spanish-English version that was pretty close to the original:  

To be or not be, that is the question.  If nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing, end them.

           

I take the experiment further in my book Words Gone Wild, which, Deo favente, will soon be an intruder in the dust of every bookshelf in America.  “Mary Had A Little Lamb,” as you will learn if you read the book, comes through the permutations of several languages as: 

          Mary had the small lamb, 
          Its quilts was beautiful like snow, 
          And this Mary went, 
         The ewe-lamb everywhere was exactly suits him.

         

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou, who regards the crass promotion represented by the previous paragraph as unspeakable gaucherie, prefers this version of “Mary”:

            Mary had a little lamb,

            Potatoes, and mint jelly,

            Pickles, slaw, and deviled ham

            She brought home from the deli.

           

            A tummy-ache made Mary weep.

            She cried, “How sick I am!”

            Then, like Bo-Peep, who lost her sheep,

            Mary lost her lamb.