redirected from Main.DoNotWant
alt title(s): Do Not Want
When something is translated to another language, and then translated back to its native language (sometimes with further translations in between).
Even when this isn't a
Blind Idiot Translation, it will still lose something when translated back.
This often happens with bootleg movies from other countries (although it's a mystery why they didn't just use the original language track). A big cause of
Translation Train Wreck.
Free on-line computer translators do this a lot, especially Babelfish.
But this can also happen with running phrases through an automated translator and back again, which is a popular internet game, and a way to invoke
Zero Wingrish.
Compare
The Vodka Is Good But The Meat Is Rotten, which is just badly translating foreign phrases to your own language.
Want some fun trying this out? Check
this site
(it uses Babelfish).
This site as well (and this one uses Google Translate).
Examples:
- The above-pictured scene from a Chinese bootleg of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (rendered as Backstroke of the West), which, when translated from English to Chinese and back to English again, rendered Darth Vader's Big No as "Do not want". In comparison to the same sub rendering "Jedi Council" as "Presbyterian Church", this is downright tame.
- The reason for this is that the word for no (bu) in Chinese is rarely used on its own, and if it were used on its own in this situation, it wouldn't make sense syntactically. Thus, they translated it as "bu yao", which means, "Do not want"
- A copy of The Two Towers with the same kind of translation errors has a character (either Gray Magic Man Gandofu or the Hobby Fred) say "fuck Alarwang, Bitch Man come!"
- A positive version of this: in Bleach, the term Shinigami was translated as "soul reaper" in America. The creator of the franchise said this is actually a much more applicable term, and it is actually what is used now.
- A computer in a lab was running a beta of some translation software package and translated "Out of sight, out of mind", a famous expression meaning "If you hide something, sometimes people forget that it existed in the first place." into Chinese and back to English, and the printout read "Invisible idiot".
- The book English As She Is Spoke. The author took a Portuguese-French phrasebook and a French-English dictionary and produced his Portuguese-English phrasebook, which is incomprehensible to English speakers and is only read for comedy value.
- Before the advent of Internet piracy, Polish gamers had to visit bazaars and benefit from disc-copying piracy. Some of these pirates were private enterpreneurs, but quite a piece of market was alleged to be held by organised crime from beyond the Eastern border. This claim was reinforced by big amounts of translation which looked suspiciously like someone sat with English-Polish dictionary, without working knowledge of any of the languages.
- Parodied in an episode of News Radio; Jimmy James notes that while his new autobiography, Jimmy James - Capitalist Lion Tamer, is selling poorly domestically, the Japanese version is doing extremely well. He decides to have it translated back into English, but finds himself at a loss when he hosts a reading, sight unseen, of the new Jimmy James - Macho Business Donkey Wrestler.
"I had a small house of brokerage on Wall Street... many days no business come to my hut... my hut... but Jimmy has fear? A thousand times no. I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey strong bowels were girded with strength like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo... dung."
"...Glorious sunset of my heart was fading. Soon the super karate monkey death car would park in my space. But Jimmy has fancy plans... and pants to match. The monkey clown horrible karate round and yummy like cute small baby chick would beat the donkey."
- Pretty much the whole point of the website Translation Party. It translates phrases from Japanese back to English until it reaches equilibrium, or translates the same from Japanese to English.
- A lot of anime is available as Hong Kong bootlegs, and is notorious for this.
- The best example this troper can think of comes from a Hong Kong bootleg of Gankutsuou, or as it refers to itself, the Cunt of Monte Cristo!
- A number of words have travelled back and forth across the English Channel in this way. For example, "le boeuf" (French) became "beef" (English), after which "beefsteak" (English) became "le biftek" (French again). Similarly, the English phrase "Country dance" became "contredanse" in French, which was then retranslated into English as "Contra dance".
- A rare example from a legitimate DVD: The City Of Lost Children is a French movie. The Region 1 DVD, distributed in the US and Canada, has both English and French subtitles available. Both of these subtitle tracks were derived not from the original French audio, but from the English dub— meaning that the French subtitles don't match the French audio in many places!
- A couple of Lord of the Rings foreign subtitled examples:
- Fellowship of the Ring: 1
- The Two Towers: 1
- Pale Fire plays with and lampshades this, with protagonist Charles Kinbote translating back into English from a copy of Timon Of Athens that has ostensibly been translated into Zemblan. As a result of lost fidelity, Kinbote can't figure out where John Shade lifted the title "Pale Fire" from for his poem. But then, translation's not the only thing that's recursive in this book.
