Never the Final Word (Vol. 2)

by FanOfMostEverything

Georg's Googol Translations (Estee's "Because nothing has EVER gone wrong with this kind of request: public opinion needed.")

Author's Note:

[Comedy]

This is a response to Estee's blog "Because nothing has EVER gone wrong with this kind of request: public opinion needed." (483 words, no tags)

HOW WE GOT HERE: Someone asked Estee for permission to translate of one of their fics into Chinese and enter it into a contest. Unsure of how to proceed and wary of splash damage from legal landmines, they asked for further advice from their followers. One thing led to another, and...

"You're being sued."

"What was that, Spike?" Twilight Sparkle looked up from her book to where her faithful assistant was sorting the massive lump of mail they had been receiving every day. Some was trash, and got the dragonfire treatment. Some was misdirected to the wrong princess, and got the special dragonfire treatment. And some was of the unfortunate type that actually had to be opened.

"Says here, a translation of your friendship book in Zebrica uses the same copyrighted phrase as--" he squinted "a two-hundred year old pillar of their religious faith. Yadda, yadda, there it is. Huh. 'Friendship is magic' translates out in Zebrican the same way, I guess."

"Can't they just change the Zebrican translation?" asked Twilight with her eyes drifting back to her place in the more important Book Of The Moment.

"Not without a change in the source material," said Spike as he read. "It turned up when the book was being translated for the West Windies, and since they have interlocking trade deals—"

"Wait a minute." Twilight put a bookmark where she had stopped reading. "They're translating my book into Windiean from the Zebrican translation?"

"Actually," said Spike with one claw on the letter. "They're translating it from the West Griffish Isles dialect, which translated it from Zebrican, which translated it from Tauren, who took it from your original book." He turned the letter sideways and squinted. "Apparently, it's a guide to dating now. Sweet."

Comments

[Misplaced Mage]

Deer Lord and Medan,

Sundae is very welcome! Introducing me the Clock Tea Movable Celluloid Images Concern are. Listen to the ambassador, and you, from the Friendship is Magic of the book as a reward for acceptance at the Searmach, escaped the Zebrican’s ambassador in desklomatic Yakyakistan party. This is a celluloid movable story to discover the future. The position of the messenger saying: for he was not.

Rutabagas,
Art Fern
Clock Tea Movable Celluloid Images Concern

[Eruantalon]

(Sent through Arabic, Icelandic, and Uzbek.)

Joke!

Why would I want to see why the pillars of Sebar were still two hundred years old? Now I think that there is no such thing as the "author of death" in the world, which can be in the future for a thousand years or more.

(Hilarious! I'm curious to know why a two-hundred-year-old pillar of Zebraican faith is still copyrighted. Though, now that I think about it, those oddities aren't out of place in a world where "the author's death" might be a thousand years or more in the future.)

[Admiral Biscuit]

Wasn’t there an infamously bad phrase book that was translated from a language that the translator didn’t know to another language he didn’t know, by means of a language he did know?

[Georg]

9438116 9438129 9438203 To be honest, when I started this comment, I took the original paragraph by Estee and fed it into Google Translate through about five languages English -> Swedish -> Spanish -> Russian -> English, if I remember right. My suspicion is that Google Translate cheats like a mother, because the end result was within one word of the start.

I was inspired by English As She Is Spoke, a hilarious Portuguese to English phrase book written by M. Carolino (Portuguese, thankfully) who did not speak a word of English, but had a French-English dictionary and a previously written Portuguese to French phrasebook written by José da Fonseca, which he plagiarized with great enthusiasm and little skill, yielding such gems as "The walls have heresay" or "That pond it seems me many multiplied of fishes. Let us amuse rather to the fishing."

However, he did succeed in making The Book of Heroic Failures. Yes, think about that for a minute.

[FanOfMostEverything]

9438393
The key is to use more obscure languages for which Google has fewer references. It has to use more tenuous word-to-word connections.

[Admiral Biscuit]

9438393

I was inspired by English As She Is Spoke, a hilarious Portuguese to English phrase book written by M. Carolino (Portuguese, thankfully

Yes, that’s the one I was thinking of.