I guess everyone's used Babelfish by now to translate foreign phrases to English or vice-versa. Have you noticed how it's always wrong? Usually it's forgiven as you can get the general gist of a phrase without sparking an international incident. But what if you took that phrase and whacked it back into Babelfish? And then did that 10 times more?
That's the idea behind Lost in Translation, a website that takes your original English phrase, and converts it to French and back, German and back, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish before giving you your phrase back in English. The results it spits back are truly fascinating, check out these...
I'll start off with something easy:
He doesn't like you.
Becomes:It does not love them.
Okay, that's not too bad. How about something longer:
More than meets the eye.
Becomes:More than he it comes to the contact of the eye.
Longer still:
My Mama always said, Life was like a box of chocolates; you never know what you're gonna get.
My always meant arsenal, that duration of the age like the structure of the chocolate; They never know that one, you stop receiving go they.
The website shows each step so you can see where the words diverge. Box of chocolates becomes chocolate framework which eventually becomes structure of the chocolate. Still have no idea where arsenal came from! Here's one last translation:
Mole! Bloody mole! We're not supposed to talk about the bloody mole, but there's a bloody mole winking me in the face! I'm gonna cut it off and chop it up and make some guacaMOLE!
Awkward person! Awkward person of the landslide! We were not speech of the awkward person of the landslide, but it has an awkward person of the landslide, that it visualizes for flashing me the eye in the face! The cut and the cut for the ascent and I give to form the Guacamolen!
Mein Gott.
