redirected from Main.DoNotWant
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 use Babelfish).
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.
- 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.
- Although not in terms of language, for a while there were Japanese dubs of Power Rangers.
- Godzilla: King of the Monsters (the American version of Gojira with added Raymond Burr footage) was dubbed back into Japanese and released as Kaiju-o Gojira.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
