h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Do you play that Google Translate game? (Back in the old days, we used Babelfish.) You translate a text - often song lyrics - from English into two or three other languages, then back into English, and bask in the gloriously nutty results.

Instant Vogon poetry.

A creative woman has done this with a famous Shakespeare speech. She also performed it on the stage of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Here's the result:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cmy6UzUJ_I

If you want to know more about the Folger and what it does, here's their website:

http://www.folger.edu/

Want to play the Google Translate game with your favourite text? Here's the page:

http://translate.google.com/

Ages ago, I was teaching translation to a class of young adults in Germany. On April Fools' Day, I gave them a page of 'The Hitchhiker's Guide' to translate into German for a 'pop quiz'...it was the part about Dr Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveller's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations...

Yes, I was an Atavista Babelfish translate gamer too.

I used to enjoy translating the sports pages, as that journalism is full of cliche, with hilarious literal translations. One of my favourites was a soccer game in which David Beckham had a physical midfield tussle with Christian Zieger. It translated as him wrestling with a goat. I stuck it to the office noticeboard.

Great! Gives a new meaning to the national sport of Afghanistan, which is 'goat wrestling'...

I had some high school students once who wanted to write a sport article in German. They tried to cheat with dad's translation software...result: the Charlotte Hornets became insects...and the 'impact' of the new manager became a car crash...

I told them, 'Garbage in, garbage out.'

I remember that the Babelfish translator got confused if you didn't use full grammatical sentences.

"I drove high up the mountain" was correctly translated, but "Drove high up the mountain" was interpreted as "A drove (a herd of something)", so this became "Foule a haut..." in French, which when translated back into English became "Crowd loud the mountain".

http://www.bbcamerica.com/anglophenia/2011/09/frasers-phrases-spend-a-penny

If Shakespeare was a Yorkshireman

To P or not to P ? that is the question, whether to spend a penny or not...