Comments on: Was??

By: Schtroumpf Grognon

Schtroumpf Grognon — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:26:12 +0000

Btw, it should be “Glaubt mir”, not “Glauben Sie mir”.

There are three “you” in German, like in French or old English. (Except English & French use the plural 2nd person in formal tenses, where German uses the plural 3rd person with an upper case.)
Informal, singular: Glaub mir
Formal, singular: Glauben Sie mir
Plural: Glaubt mir.

Obviously, Kiesl is speaking to the crowd, not to a single guy.

By: mkilby

mkilby — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 04:19:13 +0000

You don’t need a computer to mess up translations, humans do a better job. The Monty Python sketch where one character lands in court for deliberately making obscene mistakes in a foreign phrase book was an exaggeration, of course, but not by much.

By: Soup Dragon

Soup Dragon — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 23:36:15 +0000

Well, that link appears to be from August 1999, so it’s more of a Hey look, geriatrics! than an ongoing amusement thing. The songs are by Prince, I’m pretty sure you can find them on youtube. The lyric stanzas referred to are

From “Raspberry beret”:
She wore a raspberry beret
The kind you’d find in a second hand store

From “1999″
If you didn’t come to party, don’t bother knockin’ on my door
I got a lion in my pocket and, baby, he’s ready to roar

From “When Doves Cry”:
How can you just leave me standing?
Alone in a world that’s so cold? (So cold)
Maybe I’m just too demanding
Maybe I’m just like my father too bold
Maybe you’re just like my mother
She’s never satisfied (She’s never satisfied)
Why do we scream at each other?
This is what it sounds like
When doves cry

By: mitch4

mitch4 — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:43:53 +0000

Soup Dragon, thanks for the link. It’s nice to see the “round-trip translation” idea is still providing amusement on the net. Sadly, I’m unfamiliar with these songs, so can only guess what the originals were before going thru the language machines.

By: Soup Dragon

Soup Dragon — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 19:57:30 +0000

http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/99/Aug/prince.html

By: mitch4

mitch4 — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 01:39:23 +0000

These were probably apocryphal or at least exaggerated over time, but there were stories supposedly dating back to early Machine Translation projects of testing the systems by that circular translation procedure, in this case English -> Russian -> English. The story usually has a list of examples, many of them starting from proverbs or familiar sayings in English.

The example that comes to mind is “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” ==> “The vodka is strong but the meat is rotten.”

Sometimes these are presented with the goofy round-trip result given, and the reader is to guess the original.

By: ljdarten

ljdarten — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:55:32 +0000

when babelfish first came out I found you could do some interesting things by translating from one language and then back again. English to spanish, then spanish to english etc.

get some really crazy stuff by going through a whole bunch of languages.

Along the same lines you could make it translate a whole page recursively. so it would translate a translated page.

god I wish I had that free time now.

By: mitch4

mitch4 — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 08:57:21 +0000

Re “Elsa” — sorry, simply my mistake. I was thinking of that “( Eva)” signature but didn’t look it up.

By: mkilby

mkilby — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 08:32:49 +0000

@ Kamino Neko & mitch4 - Thanks very much for the insights to the French lyrics and the start date of this 9CL sequence (the previous connection problem is solved, I was able to read the whole story quickly).
As for the German, all the various literal translations are informative, but beside the point. As already stated (@ 5 & 6), the syntax is entirely “normal” (for German), so it should be rendered as “normal” English: “Please believe me, it’s not what you think.” Also, I don’t see the “Elsa” connection. Lt. (”Leutnant“) Kiesl calls Edie “Fräulein Ernst“, and she signed the photo “Edie (Eva)”, not “Elsa” (although her use of any first name could be interpreted as wanting to deepen the friendship).
P.S. Not that it is relevant, but for what it’s worth: as a normal word, “Kiesl” would mean “pebble”, and “ernst” means “serious”.

By: mitch4

mitch4 — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 07:50:02 +0000

Thanks for that YouTube link! The poster’s commentary (opened under the “more info” link) along with the lyrics were really helpful.

Though “Les Yeux d’Elsa” as KN says is not the title of this poem, neither is it entirely beside the point, as Edie is working under the name of Elsa and that is how the prisoner-officer knows her.