Thursday, January 13, 2011

Autotranslation

I'm still hovering in that sick zone where I'm ill enough to want to do nothing but sleep when I have free time, but not quite sick enough to take a sick day from work. I tried sitting down with a notepad to come up with an idea, but only got an incoherent scribble out out that. I might have interesting ideas while whacked out of my mind on cough syrup, but then I'm too messed up to actually, you know, write them down.
So to amuse you, I have translated a comedy classic, the log commercial, into Chinese. I don't actually know any more Chinese as a language than "Hello, how are you, My name is Professor Preposterous, I am an American," but mechanical translation technology has gone a lone way since then. The log commercial is, of course, a parody of slinky commercials that ran in the sixites.
Google literally translates the log song's lyrics as:
楼梯上滚落下来什么
单独或成对
运行在你的邻居的狗
什么是伟大的零食
和配合你的背部
它的日志,日志记录。
它的日志
它的日志
它的大,它的沉重它的木材
它的日志
它的日志
这是比坏更好,这是很好的。
每个人都喜欢的日志
你会爱上它,登录。

This would be a mouthful to sing, so for that, I pidginized the lyrics until they fit.

楼下的什
么辊
粉碎了邻居的狗
也许可以吃
很容易携带
这是一个日志
的日志的日志
它大,它沉重,木质
的日志的日志
更坏,它的好
你会爱上日志
每个人喜欢日志

So, why do this elaborate waste of time? For one, translation technology amazes me. At work, I handle requests from all over the world, but officially, they're supposed to be filed in English, as we are an American company and cannot reasonably be expected to have, say, French speakers on hand. So when someone doesn't speak English....they can run their comments through this translation program, and be able to talk to us anyway.
Technology, hell yeah.

1 comment:

KaiWen said...

Google translate isn't perfect, although it works very well for Chinese, its terrible at Korean. I actually use GT as a learning tool for Chinese, it translates any word I want into the correct characters and even gives you the pinyin transliteration.

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