On a rival (?) site that I won't name I found the following given as the correct translation (yes, correct) of 'God save the Queen':

Dieu, économisez notre reine

I wonder if others would like to add absurd translations ...

I love it.

I thought it might tickle you, Sue. and

Good thinking!!

Oh, that's great!
If you ever try using an online translator, those are the types of translations you get.

As a Spanish teacher, it makes it really easy to tell if a student has tried to cheat on a written assignment. (And I always get to laugh at the things they come up with.)

I wonder how the Queen would feel if she saw something like that?!

There is, of course, the famous and oft-repeated (in many versions) joke about the computer programmed to translate between languages:


http://www.snopes.com/language/misxlate/machine.htm

Invisible insanity as a translation of Out of sight, out of mind is hilarious!

I think we have a couple of quizzes online along those lines - song lyrics translated through an onilne transaltor into Russian or Chinese, and then back into English. It's not always easy to recognize them, even ones you know well.

Locally a whole batch of leaflets printed in Portuguese regarding drinking and driving had to be scrapped. Apparently when giving the value of the units it said "a half a pint of beer, a small glass of wine or a single tot of ghosts".

On a more personal note, my house has a name as well as a number. The previous occupants saw this word in Portugal or somewhere and thought it looked good so they gave the name to this house. I get some VERY strange looks at times (we have a lot of Portuguese people here), they cannot understand why anyone would name their house "Young lad/boy".

Oh, Sue!

Some months ago a machine translation from Italian told me that "a large crowd assisted at the execution". Fortunately, I remembered from my student days that in French assister à means to be present at - and drew the obvious sensible conclusion.

The problem with 'assister' in French to assisted in English was particularly bad for actor Gerard Depardieu who grew up in a rough home environment and ran away rather early. He had been hanging out with 'carnies' at the traveling shows and carnivals and seen a rape occur. As a kid, he wasn't really able to protest this or basically get beaten up no doubt and he related this incident in English to an interviewer.
Gege's English isn't terribly good but he said assisted...which means he actually participated in English. He was boycotted by many organizations for years because of this.
Assister is one way to say, to go to class in French, so if you translate it too literally, it sounds like you're helping the prof in English.
Assistance is a little different. It's a classic faux ami though. A false friend.

I play on one of the translation sites quite often as it's amusing to take a passage, put it into a language then put it back into the original and see if it holds up. I have put passages through about ten languages.

As a translator though, I've seen many mistakes over the years...

Some of the best ones,

ghost cheese (instead of goat cheese!)

You can have your flowers delivered in their slime to your room. (this is a funny one because vase with the feminine article is slime or mud in the river or lake bottom, and le vase is the vase we'd use in English)

Children's menu,
pastes instead of pasta.

I remember one that was funny in a company I was working in. The client's name was a name that sounded like wifeswapping...and the spellchecker offered that and someone accepted that without thinking...which meant that an enormous document had the word for wifeswapping throughout it. We're still wondering why the spellchecker had that in it!

French menus are notoriously difficult to translate into English as, English just can't come close to French for food and the French really go all out in their poetic descriptions, to the point of nausea sometimes...I mean, it's corny to read some of them written by writers who aren't talented...
So you'll find some funny ones on the menus if you travel there. They were using this online translator for them while writing up the menus and it was clear to me!

Quote:

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If you ever try using an online translator, those are the types of translations you get.

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Interestingly enough, the advocates of machine translation were warned nearly fifty years that this kind of problem would be insuperable without major advances in our knowledge of how syntax and semantics really function. There has been enromous progress in syntax and the key problem area is semantics. This is highly inconvenient as ultimately language is about conveying meaning.

[Edited in order to add the last two sentences].

I remember getting jobs from people who had tried to put their work through an online translation program...what a mess! Even they could see how bad it was!

When I was trained with machine assisted software, it was very sophisticated and quite useful in the hands of a competent translator. It did a fuzzy match, and several others, and you could fine tune it as you liked.
If you were to translate a manual then put it into the database as a source, it would use that as a dictionary for further documents.

So if I wrote, 'insert part A into part B' twenty thousand times, the computer would either, wait for me to approve this phrase be translated, or, at my request, translate it automatically.

I do not know about computer translators but I am familiar with people translators. There is less room for error but it does have it's moments. I sit in on translated readings from tribal leaders. The language of the text is usually all but lost save for a few interpreters. It is our culture to hand down these stories by mouth and to copy them in or to a different language is considered wrong.

So, as the life of the language dims, the interpretations become harder and translations get more confusing.

I once heard a story from a young apprentice that reflected the travails of a small band of Sioux warriors that were led to victory by a large airplane in the sky even though their enemies were already dead.
A closer look revealed that the Sioux were guided by a sky Spirit in the shape of a large white eagle. Their enemies were not dead though their camp was buried under heavy snow.

If a machine translation needs to be checked, supervised or controlled by a human translator, then its usefulness is rather limited, though the machine may take some of the drudgery out of translating.

Of course, human beings can also make howlers, or may not really understand what is meant by translate, translation. In 2001, in Lübeck, I was surprised to read:

Good bourgeois cuisine

It's one possible word-for-word translation of:

gutbürgerliche Küche.

Of course, the English conveys nothing (beyond ineptitude). Somehow the translator (if that's the right word) had overlooked the supreme importance of conveying the meaning of the original, which in this case is really something like:

traditional German cuisine.

The problem with machine assisted is that if you accept a translation without thinking, you'll have problems later. It is a bit like running an assembly line machine and making an error which has repercussions on the next station on the line!

YOu have a similar problem with Word's search and replace function when you write a long document and replace a term with another one. I once saw the computer replace the components of that word throughout an entire passage!
I mean, if I put in, change orange to red, it would take not only the word 'orange' but any of its components, or, range, etc. then you'd see, redange, ored, or something along those lines!
You had to have a professional doing it.
If you had entire phrases, the machine would do a fuzzy match and beep you if it found a phrase that was 99 percent close to yours. This way, sentence order problems wouldn't be as bad, but I never really let it do that automatically because it always led to trouble.

I just watched a movie and the slang translations were so bad, I wondered what the person had been drinking while they typed it up! Honestly...the slang was basic French stuff, and the English sounded so unlikely it cannot have been a native speaker of English with any knowledge of French slang.
There was one word for something that neither of us had ever heard of, and, it was the name of a tradesman in English. Probably came out of a dictionary like the one on the Word Wizard game here. In a contemporary film it sounded ridiculous. It was neither British nor American English either.

I wonder what people will make of this text on Simon Bolivar. He's described, among other things, as:

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commander of the American emancipation, fruit of the love between Juan Vicente of Bolivar y Ponte and Maria de la Concepcion Palacios y Blanco

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A little later, he's also described as a sapling. However, this is as nothing by comparison with some of the grammatical errors:

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and he looked at icily, tiredly perhaps; to the ladies and gentlemen that went and came between the big curtains of silk, by the cabinets of mahogany or under the trees of the patio.

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Also:

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One could not explain, exactly like it would happen in a novel, that they had given the boy in his hands for error or for his uncle's indifference. The sure, it is that, starting from that day began a new life, very solitary for the boy thanks to the natural state where he had been placed by his new teacher and friend.

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Source: http://www.unet.edu.ve/~lsb/ebiograf.htm


Of course, I'm not sure whether this is in fact a translation or whether it's just poor Enlgish.

Years ago I bought my then five year old daughter a product known as "Echo - Mic." Sort of a battery free, cordless kareoke set up for toddlers. The instructions on the back of the box [which was produced in China] were without rival...
"You take mighty fun ECHO MIC out of the box and sing correctly into it. Lots of fun for Mama, Dad and Lady Employee, too."

Whenever you see the telltale, 'cabinets of mahogany' you know it's a translation.

The Absurd French quizzes that I wrote use this inherent difference because the possessive is so different.
If you have, my uncle's wife's poodle's flea's dinner it's still reasonably readable! If you have le diner du puce du caniche de la femme de mon oncle it's a little heavier!

I have seen many incorrect translations on packaging from China - many keep me in stitches.
When we lived in Greece, the menu in a resturant listed "Lamp chops". We still call them Lamp chops to this day.

Bruyere, I have to confess that I remember learning that Gerard Depardieu had committed/"participated" in that horrible act and therefore refused to see him in anything. I couldn't understand how someone could do such a thing and yet go on to movie stardom without having to answer for it. I never knew that it was just a case of poor translation; thank you for clearing that up for me. I feel so bad for holding a grudge against the poor guy for all these years, not that he would know or care as I am a nobody. But then again, to think that if there were others out there under the same false impression and behaving the same way it certainly would hurt box office revenues.

Speaking of "poor translation" I remember moving to Brussels a few years ago when my son was just four months old. We were welcomed to the neighborhood by some Greek neighbors who just loved babies. So the first time they came to visit our home we were all sitting around in the living room and Lily and Stella (the mother and daughter) were just gushing over my son. They kept talking to him and telling him how cute he was and saying "I want to kill you". My husband and I of course stared at one another in shock! I imagine they must have been trying to translate a common Greek phrase similar to "I could hug you to death" or some such comment and it just didn't translate well. I would like to say that my son is now nearly seven years old and was never harmed during this or subsequent gatherings where this phrase was repeated.

I went to a Spanish site for students, and they had a list of the top 10 phrases that are translated badly.

Here are a few:
Antes que te cases mira lo que haces.
(Look before you leap.)

Literal: Before you marry, look at what you do.

Como el burro que tocó la flauta.
(By pure luck.)

Literal: As the burro played the flute.

The rest are at http://www.studyspanish.com/topten_phrases.htm

Regarding translations (bad ones), the absolute abomination I've seen here in my neck of woods, was Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" translated as "A Letter from Scarlet"

Another "top" one - somewhere in a book about Freddie Mercury's life, there was a phrase saying: "among the participants we had groups like U2, The Who and Spandau Ballet."

And the Romanian translator came up with - "...we had U2 and The Who and Spandau - Ballet Group."

I always loved this one:

Um eine unfrüchtbäre Käter zu haben

It's the German phrase for to have a hangover, but it literally translates to "In order to have an infertile male cat". Yay!