Funny Translation Errors

If you're reading this page, you may also be interested in Alta Vista's realtime machine translator at http://babelfish.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/translate. Apart from its numerous practical uses (for instance, translating the only page that met your search criteria, but which happened to be in Portuguese), the most entertaining use of it is to translate text to another language and back. For example, the following table shows the results of translating "the linguistic fun page", a pretty straightforward, idiom-free phase:
French "the linguistic page of recreation"
German "the linguistic fun page"
Italian "the linguistica page of divertimento"
Portuguese "the linguistic page of the amusement"
Spanish "the linguistic pagination of the diversion"

Try something obscure or idiomatic and it's a free-for-all.
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Jump List: The Linguistic Fun Page | OjoHaven | Feedback


Jump List: The Linguistic Fun Page | OjoHaven | Feedback

1 This is from an uncredited email i received. I've tried without success to find a source.
2 This is from the July, 1996 edition of
Playboy magazine, in the "Playboy After Hours" section.
3 Quoted in The Mother Tongue : English & How It Got That WayAmazon.com [c.US$10] by Bill Bryson.
4 according to http://www.goodnet.com/~dogbyte quoting EE Times, October 8, 1996
5 cited in For God, Country and Coca-Cola : The Unauthorized History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes ItAmazon.com [c.US$14], by Mark Pendergrast, according to Stirling Hinchliffe, stirlmeg@petrie.starway.net.au
6From an email i received from Steve Pegg, steven.pegg@st-johns.oxford.ac.uk.
7From an email i received from Stephen Ford, sford@macquarie.com.au.
8According to an email i received from Debbie Fowler, dfowlstj@pop.k12.vt.us.
9This and other interesting translation errors are addressed at http://www.snopes2.com/business/misxlate/ at http://www.snopes2.com/