«You want to tell me that that
wants to chase a plastic fist
Put is a homosexuality into
my fart eye?»
–Borat
Seriously?
Is it machine translation? Crowdsourcing? Back-translation? Maybe all of the above, but these subtitles are as funny (and intelligible) as they can get. Not even a professional translator could decipher that.
Machine translation usually produces funny results. But machine back-translation[*] is absolutely hilarious!
Translation Party is a website that uses machine translation to «translate» a phrase repeatedly until it reaches its ‘equilibrium’. It means that a phrase is machine-translated from English into Japanese, back into English, back into Japanese, repeatedly, until the result is the same English machine-translation, and that is equilibrium. Not all phrases reach that pure, disastrous level of machine-translation equilibrium, but they all are horrendous.
I decided to put Translation Party to the test with ‘Hey Jude’ by The Beatles. The sad, sad result is after the break:
