Sunday, April 1, 2007

Lost in translation



























































I LOVE Blogspot(Caps intended). You write a blog, check the number of profile visitors, the figures dont exactly send your spirits soaring, no problem. Just press F5 on your keypad and voila, count + 1. For best results, try it as many times as possible. For not too bad results, try only at home. Expecting your boss to know the importance of the number of profile visitors for a blogger, is like expecting George Bush to know the capital of the United States. Give him a 'W' and a 'N' for a clue and he'll say "Myke no mystyke. Its Wellington".

So, getting to the actual topic, I have a question here.
What would you do if a gorgeous babe you barely got to be friends with, sends you a mail saying "My body is very hot. How is your body?"
Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm guessing 3 concurrent reactions here. Jaw drops, tongue pops out, eyes almost fall out of their sockets. As a direct consequence of the above actions, your face will look so stupid, Jim Carrey in an Ace Ventura movie will look like the most sober person on earth in comparison.
And of course, you dont need a hundred trillion grey cells to figure out what you'd be thinking. For all practical considerations based on everything thats been researched and re-researched by any university worth the concrete its built with, its a given that the typical babes-dont-put-any-ghaas-to-me male pysche manifests itelf in one universal reaction when encountered with such a situation and that reaction being a "WTF?"...Yes "WTF?", with the tempo gradually tapering down to account for the this-is-too-good-to-be-true factor; you know what i'm talking about right...Something like "Whaatttthhhhhaaaaaaaffffffffffff....."
Before you start thinking which noblest of the souls you are a reincarnation of, to be warranting such a good fortune, I'd like you to put your thoughts on hold just for little while and join me on a fantasy trip.
Boys and girls, young and old, Welcome to the land of the rising sun, the land where anything is possible(proverbially and literally), the land of perennial KLPDs. Welcome to Larry Page and Sergey Brin's unique gift to mankind; "Google language tools--->Japanese to English(beta)". And then, there was light!

I need a little flashback here to explain better.
"Okie Mr.Flashbacker, T minus 2 days please"
...rrrreeeeeeoooooooowwwwwwwww...
"Maa, meli chaddi kahaan hai?" TANG! Wha..where..how...
"Hey there, didn't I tell you no boozing during work-time?"
"Oopsh, shorry shir...here you go"
He gets it right this time.

T-2 days
Well, this babe i was talking about, looks kinda sick. What a co-incidence.So am I.
T-1 day
We dash into each other at coffee time and i ask her whats wrong. She says she has fever and I tell her that I'm having fever too.
T-0
I send her a mail which says "How are you feeling today?". All she typed in Japanese was an innocent "I'm feeling very feverish. How about you?". As you must have guessed, Google translation did the rest and made fodder for letters to Penthouse off a courteous health enquiry.
Anyways, this is one of the (mis)translations i could decode before any damage was done...There are more which i have hopelessly given up on. Sample these:
"When you press the simulate button, I appear on screen" (WOW! Just in case you didn't know how advanced these Japs are!)
"This point is designated uselessness" (Very very in-your-faceish)
"Pour the divided tea cup into boiling water" (Yeah, that tea-making doubles up as a kung-fu session where u get to break the cup with your bare hands)
And the list goes on....
Life in a foreign country, i figured, is very easy if you care to have a conversational knowledge of their language. But for a quintessential lazy bum like me, realisations hit in late.My Japanese definitely doesn't figure in the list of the top ten linguistic achievements of the century, but if your vocabulary gets exhausted in a 2 minute conversation with a taxi-driver, being bad isn't enough. You need to be pathetic. Yours truly is truly just that.

But hey, just to cheer myself up, i can throw in a little bit of every language. Like for example, this cousin of mine, who has a vacation plan in Spain..I told her she wont be having too much of a trouble managing over there. After all, Spanish is bread,butter,jam..Just pick an English sentence, add a ~ or a ` to every vowel in the sentence and there you have your Spanish Senõr/Senõrita, ready to be served.
Of course, you gotta remember nothing is pronounced as its spelt, "Ja" becomes "ya", "Jo dud" may actually be a "Yo dude" ..You know, stuff like that!
I picked up some French too, don't remember from where though..
Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ?
Thank you thank you :)

Anyways, there are 2 immediate morals for me from all this:

  1. Get your Japanese right before you land in Japan again. You see, when you end up calling a girl "honest" when you actually wanted to call her "beautiful", there's precious little dame luck can do for you.
  2. Remember, Google translation sucks!
So long then. Its weekend. I need to hibernate.

7 comments:

Unknown said...

Good work brother...
Translations are funny and interesting to talk about.. Write more about them

Chitra Shenoy said...

ROFL..It was really really funny..Loved it..:))..

BTW have you not yet stopped flirting with japanese babes..I hope Google does not mistranslate a genuine compliment you offer them..just tell your Indian friends in advance to bail you off in such situations..:P

Sachin R K said...

Very phunny :)))

BTW ,watching profile views increase is old hat. Check out google.com/analytics I guarantee Google does web traffic analysis better than it does transalation :)))

FamiliarQuark said...

My commiserations Babz..
You are not alone in this suffering.

I have had my share of "Please cleaning the toilet".

Sharanu said...

Interesting Blog... Lets hope you can use the new translator in crisis lest the traslator herself should not become the cause of the crisis ;) Anyway keep up the good spirit. BTW if interested to find jokes on translation and languages visit http://www3.sympatico.ca/srajano/jokes.html#three

Jax said...

Bwahahaha! Hilarious those pics.

Jaws dropped, tongue popped out, eyes fallen out of their sockets. Still can't believe you could pull this KLPD on us!

Extremus Abnormalus said...

@everybody: Sorry for the long break..Lotsa things happening and havent been able to check me blog.
@amit: Thanks dude :)
Actually, working for a Jap company leaves me with no choice but to decode some really hilariously outrageous translations and thats the best part of my work..Will keep posting more of em!

@Chitra: Hope springs eternal and am a firm believer that language shouldnt be a barrier for flirtatious intentions ;)

@sachin: Thanks for that info dude..No hard feelings for Google translation though. It made a babe ask me something I've been longing since long for!

@Sandeep: Who better to understand my predicament than you dude ;)

@Sharan:Those were hilarious :))

@Jax: Them not all dude...Find more of such pics that'll make you laugh your lungs out @ www.engrish.com