Cunning Clever Linguists

A reader of Walking the Berkshires in Italy has used Google's translation software to render my blog in Italian.  I am speechless.  I have no way of gaging whether this makes my prose any more intelligible to my Italian audience, as the only Italian I know (besides a few obviously hackneyed and cliched phrases and gestures) comes from a bawdy medieval ballad of cuckoldry - So Ben Mi Ca Bon Tempo - delivered with furious acoustic attack by the great Richard Thompson as part of his Thousand Years of Popular Music CD and DVD.  I imagine it comes across to a native reader of Italian rather like having baseball play-by-play transcribed into Middle English for a pub full of Yorkshiremen.

Which is a clever segue to my next astonishing linguistic discovery, a devastating critique by no less than Lowys, the child of Geoffrey Chaucer, in the aforementioned Middle English and seasoned with Hip Hop Cant, of the video game Blade Storm: Hundred Year's War  Verily, I swive thee not.  I laughed so hard I burst my doublet.  Lowys declares it "a salt-herring of a game" even though it has yet to be released, and it is worth the price of admission just to hear his pixelated battle cry "“IT IS ST SWITHUNZ DAY AND FOR XL MORE DAYS IT WILL BE RAINING THE BLOOD OF NOOBS.”

Best of many great moments in the post: 

"And while were listing the SORE LACKITUDE of this fugazy Bladestorm situation, scire facias this:
'You'll be able to choose from 10 playable characters at the outset, and more will become available as you progress through the game.'

Only X? Thats like having only three characterz in the romance of the rose. Theyre totally going to choose the basix, and they’ll do up all the outfits stupid like in those other koei games, like give Le Prince Noir some stupid all black costume (for real Prince Ed always dressed up like swamp thing, he was CRAZY about imitating a woodwose. Dad says at parties the Prince was always like doing woodwose stuff and people were like “enough with the woodwosery” and he was like 'eff you all, I’m the black prince.')"

Clearly Lowys Chaucer has a great career in letters ahead of him and it is instructive to see how the English language evolves in the space of a single generation.  Read the whole, mirthful thing here. 

Lastly, and incredibly, the Bard himself has been translated into Klingon.  The Klingon Hamlet is the longest work in existance in the warrior language of the foes of Captain Kirk.  The mind boggles.

Peace out, milords and ladies, and enough with the woodwosery.

Comments

[Aydin]

I use the free translation sites occasionally & mostly to translate from German. Translated text always requires a lot of editing before it makes any sense.

They are also a source of humor:
http://snailstales.blogspot.com/2006/05/translation-fun.html

[GreenmanTim]

I figured as much!

Beowulf is in Old English, while Middle English covers the various forms of our language spoken and written between the Norman Conquest and the mid to late 1500s. Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog and La Journelle Nouvelle de Katherine de Swyneford on my blog roll are among my guilty pleasures. The conceit is grand and it actually is not too difficult to make sense of what they are writing in Middle English about modern topics.

[Laura]

I doubt very much that google does your blog justice in Italian. Translation by rote or machine is awful, dangerous, and always hilarious.

I work as a social worker and there are not enough of us who are bilinguals to go around. Many people use those sites to translate letters to clients if they can't get one of us to do it for them. It's all done very literally. For example, a letter to a client explaining the medical benefits she would be eligible for included the term *labor and delivery* (related to her pregnancy) and google translated that into Spanish as *struggle and shipment*! Do you imagine she was insulted or just confused?

Is it Beowulf that's written in middle English? Don't have a good memory of high school literature, but I do remember one teacher reading us *something* that sounded very odd for English.