Showing posts with label Meaning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Meaning. Show all posts

Saturday, November 25, 2017

The Telephone Game, Updated with Google Translates

I imagine that most if not all of us have during our childhood experienced...usually at school or parties...the Telephone Game.  This is when a group of several kids sit around in a circle and each one whispers a short message to the next one...who then whispers it to whoever's on the other side.  When the message finally returns to the first kid after going around the circle, it is usually...and hilariously...very different from its original form.  Which is the whole point of the game, naturally.  We can in our Internet age do a different version of this, by starting with a basic sentence in English and then with the use of the Google Translates feature translate it into a different foreign language.  So 1 translates to 2, 2 translates to 3, and so on down the line until 14 translates back into English...which is usually altered from the original statement.  I tried this out by taking yesterday's quote from Igor Stravinsky and passing it from English through 13 successive languages and then back.  The result wasn't altered too much, but there still was a divergence from the originally expressed quote;:

1: I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.
2: No he entendido un bar de música en mi vida, pero lo he sentido.
3: Ich habe kein Musikstück in meinem Leben verstanden, aber ich habe es gefühlt.
4: Я не понимал музыки в своей жизни, но я это почувствовал.
5: 我一生都不了解音樂,但是我感覺到了
6: Je n'ai pas connu la musique toute ma vie, mais je l'ai ressentie.
7: मुझे अपने सभी जीवन में संगीत नहीं पता था, लेकिन मुझे यह महसूस हुआ।
8: Tôi không biết âm nhạc trong suốt cuộc đời, nhưng tôi cảm thấy nó.
9: Nem ismerem a zenét egész életemben, de úgy érzem.
10: 나는 내 인생의 모든 음악을 모르지만, 나는 기분이 좋아.
11: Hayatımdaki tüm müzikleri bilmiyorum, ama hoşuma gidiyor.
12: أنا لا أعرف كل الموسيقى في حياتي، ولكن أنا يتمتع بها
13: 私は私の人生のすべての音楽を知らないが、私はそれを楽しむ。
14: Nie znam całej muzyki mojego życia, ale lubię to.
15: I do not know the whole music of my life, but I like it.

As you can see, between the translations somewhere "understand" changed to "know", "whole" was added, first to modify "life" and then switched to modify "music" (which dropped "bar"), the tense changed from present perfect to present, and "felt" changed to "like".   Now the fun in this game is to look back on the translations and see where the changes occurred.  For example, the change from "understood" to "knew" occurred between the Chinese (#5) sentence and the French (#6).  "Whole life" first appeared in Chinese (#5) as 一生.  Since I know some of these languages better than others, there are sections where the changes can be hidden and it takes some extra linguistic detective work to find them.  By the way, do you know which languages are featured here?