Fun with Babel Fish

[absolutgermanyfangrl]

Does Babel Fish translate what things literally mean?

[Hentaisan606]

@alajactaest

Bei mir:

Gerechtigkeitsente! o.O

[MrIco]

Bin Laden seems to be dead .. :O ..just say'n :P

[pizzaguy553]

the flesh emits butt! LOLOLOL I laughed soooooooooo hard!

[Puschit1]

That translator is named after the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy for a reason ...

[gwb911]

that's not fun!!@! you need to translate goatse lady killers to various tongues...

[TruthNeverFade]

bloody stupid johnson :D

[wolffe93]

Und es erhöht und die sie abfassen, ein Gespräch, sie hatte peaces hatten. Möglichkeit nie die formuliert. Die Erde fing für sein erzittert an. Die Epidemie für auch verteilt es. Das Land starb. Dieses lacht über, welchem wir, die wir in der Mitte finden für, am Ende tosenden, um zu explodieren, dieses Gelächter im schrecklichen untragbaren Leiden der Schmerz von Dauer, parce sie coloc von contently. Wer dieses schreckliche Geschöpf wünscht, das dort nur erhöht wird.

[Sicktremo]

A normal halbmond terassenförmig. Lmao xDD

[mohawkman2006]

私はbabelfishを頻繁に使用する lol i love babel fish

[abb9999999]

Are there any German to English translators that are a bit more "legitimate" than Babelfish?

[rewboss]

@abb9999999 If by "legitimate" you mean "accurate", then yes: it's called a "human being".

[Upflamoer]

@abb9999999

Use Google. I jused it for English to German.

But you have to know most of the german words, cause you can just translate a few words if you want it to be right :D

[princessjodii]

I like your hair :)

[MrOsamaful]

Terry Pratchett is for kids d;

[YOUnoobGER]

Genial! Einfach epic!

[Yonkage]

I like to chain translations. I translate English to French to Russian to Spanish and then back to English. By then, you end up with something completely illegible and ridiculous.

"I love to tie the translations. He was leading the English language in the French language in the Russian language in the Spanish language and then behind in the English language. Since then, you meet something completely incomprehensibly and ridiculously."

I guess it kinda makes sense...

[juligirl2000]

cool du bist deutsch und keiner hats gemerkt ;)

ich will das auch!

[n1g3ld34c0n]

What I do is I go English to Japanese and back again. Hilarity ensues. Like so:

I doing as for me from English which goes Japanese and for the second time there is a back section. The making merry noise continues. So, the way:

...See what I mean?

[Clickthisprofile]

Try doing an english to japanese translation then translate it back. Then translate your newly formed 'engrish' to japanese and back again. You'll notice that your statement changes every time you translate it, it's hard to believe that even engrish can be butchered, but babelfish can do it.

[FuguTheFish]

I suck a lot - I inhale the large quantity

[reala1234567]

i try to use it but it wont work is says numbers and letters

[consumptionof]

I once typed in "Call of Duty 2", turned it to Chinese and back, and I got:

"Work request 2"

"Call of Duty: Finest Hour"?

No no, "Work request happiest hour".

[ahcapella]

A friend and I have been having a lot of fun with babel fish, translating into Spanish, then back into English. The results usually bear little resemblance to the original text. Recently I typed in the words to the song Helter Skelter, hoping it would mangle them. I wasn't disappointed! "When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide" became "When with himself to the part inferior that I return to the cover of the slide."

[ahcapella]

(cont'd) "Where I stop, and I turn, and I go for a ride," became "Where unemployment and I give return and I go for a stroll." But my favorite line of all was, "Do you, don't you want me to love you?" which became "Hágale, don' t you would want that she lands on water to him?" Hahahaha! She lands on water to him? WTF?

[rewboss]

Brilliant! We should collect all of these in a book. "Rock Classics by Babelfish".

[ahcapella]

LOL! Indeed! I'd *love* to hear Sir Paul belt out the Babelified lyrics, but he would find it to exceedingly awkward. I'll PM you the complete lyrics to "Skelter de Helter," as I already have them typed out. Haha!

[Aggionist]

An ddoes the flesh on it's butt

LOL

[JackOfBlades434]

Babel Fish Isn't Alway's Right, I Translated italian Piano To English And It Means Quiet And Not Slowly, Same With Forte Fast? No It Mean's Loud!

[jadine0949]

hahaha.

[BattlefieldDoktor]

Bable Fish ... the greatest tool to have some fun with translations ;o) At Bable Fish appears nowadays the Yahoo logo. Seems like AltaVista sold it to them or they got completely purchased by Yahoo.

[Greenscarfcat]

I call it Babble Fish because it makes no sense whatsoever. I typed in "Oh duck how we miss your quacking!" translated it to Japanese and back again, and my result was "We how let escape your quacking, the duck of Ohio state!"

Where the HELL did Ohio state come from!

[rewboss]

Wow, that's a classic. Good find. :)

At a wild guess, I'd say it was the "Oh", which Babel Fish took to be OH, the two-letter abbreviation for the US state of Ohio. So "OH duck" would be "Ohio duck", the duck of Ohio state.

[Greenscarfcat]

Yeah, that sound like it makes sense...Thanks!

[BeakyRed]

I typed in "The answer to life, the universe, and everything is 42." and after translating it back and forth loads of times I got "Life, which answers l' ; interval far and totality 42."

[BeakyRed]

The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear, you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language.

[BeakyRed]

The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix, formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them.

[uihks]

Wow. Look at this.

I put in the following sentence: "I am so hungry that I could eat a bear" and after translating it back and forth between different languages it said this: "Over me I eat [ku] [mA] and the good width, which lets it be hungry"

[sassy304]

You should translate rap songs using this,they come out hilarious.

[stukie321]

fag bag!

[matchheads]

i used to do this all the time for kicks.

[Gaugaukkistonnian]

Gobble-dee-gook!! Eeeek I don't know why, but I thought that was absolutey hilarious!! :)

[Mashirafen]

I gets even better if you translate it back and forth through several or all of the languages.

[videogamemusicgalore]

LoLz. we get a load of gobbledeegook.

[NeoApocalypse]

Why you quote from the Bible is beyond me, the very existence of the Babelfish is proof for the non-existence of God.

Proof denies faith and without faith God is nothing, but the babelfish is so useful that it proofs the existence of God and therefore he doesn't exist Q.E.D.

:-D

[martymccloud]

wow, you got too much time dude

wow, du hast echt zuviel freizeit, alter

[BattlefieldDoktor]

LOL, Altavista is always fun about re-translations, hahaha ;o)

[Midnight0000]

sehr lustig.

ich habe deutsch für vier jahren gelernt und hatte mich nie auf AltaVista gelassen. es ist immer falsch

[UriGellerForum]

Ja Altavista ist schon geil ... aber die Übersetzung ist meiner Meinung noch besserer als bei gooogle und yamuh :) Interessantes vid!

[aiden6781]

i thought babel fish was a fish ....

[Zega000]

and a web site

[muserine]

There's a great comment on my first video, which says:

"Willkommen zu IhnenSchlauch" ;-)

Oh, and maybe BabelFish can only translate Douglas Adams novels properly...

[itekisan]

@muserine:

;) In fact, the Douglas Adams novels are the best English to German translation I've read so far! (Many thanks and a lot of respect to Benjamin Schwarz! He found an excellent and fitting replacement for EVERY un-translatable pun!) Terry Pratchett's novels, in contrast, are mainly translated very very poorly (various translators, some may be good perhaps).

[rewboss]

If I'd thought a bit more about this, I probably would have used a Douglas Adams text. I just happened to have a Pratchett to hand. :)

[terraceterra]

Interesting idea to bring to light the weaknesses of online translators. I have been messing around with three translators myself and comparing what I get with similar results. Many times I will translate in all three of them back and forth to compare results. The differences can be astounding and confusing. It can also be helpful when they all seem to basically agree, but it would be nice to get a consistent reliable result.

[terraceterra]

I have also noticed one online translator may choose to use the familiar and others may use the formal and there is no way to say what you prefer when make the request. :o :[ :/ :] My final opinion is this; they are better than nothing but they need a lot of work done on them before they are even close to being a perfected reliable source of translation.

[terraceterra]

I have been learning German for about two years now almost entirely on my own without the benefit of having a classroom setting or others to speak with. I did take one community class but it was very basic and too short to learn much. University classes are way too expensive and in general it seems that German is not very popular where I live. So it is only with great personal persistence that I know what I know in German.

[terraceterra]

Still I feel I am at a very basic level as far as being able to express myself effectively but I can understand and read a lot more than I can speak or write. I do like to watch as much German media as I can get my hands on. The internet has been an incredible resource for this and now I have got quite a collection of movies, documentaries, music, and even American German dubbed TV shows.

[terraceterra]

You are so very fortunate to be living in Germany were you have the opportunity to practice and interact with native German speakers daily. That would be ideal. I lived in Germany when I was a little kid but only picked up a tiny bit of German. I have since been back to visit for about three weeks and really enjoyed it there but that was before I decided to really try and learn the language. Ah yes, Fifty Videos is quite an accomplishment. Thank you for yet another interesting one. :)

[itekisan]

Congratz on your 50th vid! :)

And about those translation websites and software, I really wonder what kind of people actually use them. They are so bad!

And the bad news is: they will hardly ever get even near a human translator. As Dietrich Dörner, professor on neuropsychology, shows in his book "Bauplan für eine Seele" (Construction of a Soul, not yet translated), a translator is only as good as his ability to UNDERSTAND the world written/spoken about.

[rewboss]

They can be useful to help you understand the basic gist of a simple text; beyond that, of course, they're useless. Often, people put Babel Fish "translate this page" buttons on their sites in the genuine belief that this delivers perfect results. Since they don't speak these other languages, they have no way of knowing how awful the translations can be.