When I was in secondary school the language teachers always warned us about the general unreliability of online translators, and the fact that it was usually immediately obvious if one had been used.
They can be of use if you are translating a word or relatively simple phrases, but anything more complicated and it all tends to go wrong. Although some are better than others, all online translators struggle to deal with complex sentence structures and have little ability to take context into account, which is absolutely crucial if you are looking for an accurate translation. They also tend to have problems with colloquial language and sayings.
A group of my students who are taking a special module about cinema had been tasked with writing a script for a movie, which I was given today to look over and correct mistakes in the English (the language the module is taught in). It quickly became apparent that they had written it in Catalan, and then pasted it into an online translator. I could just about make out the general plot (a sordid affair involving drugs and prostitution), but large parts of the script were completely unintelligible.
My favourite parts were:
"She goes to scroll her body to the disco sweet." (When I read this I burst out laughing.)
"Oysters! If in nothing do I have between the legs...Matches you shit it, where I have the head? Has gone for me of a hair!" (Impossible to understand, but it sounds almost like the kind of language you'd find in a Shakespeare play!)
The phrase "Oysters!" confused me particularly. I asked one of the English teachers, and it is a direct translation of "ostres", which is both the Catalan word for oysters but also an exclamation that roughly translates as "damn".
Why the word for oysters is used as an exclamation, I have no idea...
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LOL! Brilliant. I discovered how terrible they were during GCSE german, I wrote a paragraph in English, then translated it to German, then translated the result back to English to check it. What it gave me was utter gibberish, nothing at all like what I had originally written! Although nothing as crazy as using "Oysters" as an exclamation!
ReplyDelete"Ostres" is the polite version for "ostia!", which means Eucharistic Wafer. It's like saying "Gosh" instead of "God" or "darn" instead of "damn".
ReplyDeletePersonally, I think it's stranger to say "Wafer" as an exclamation than "Oysters"! :)
You can say Ostia! Joder (it's a colloquialism of spanish I think) Merda(shit)
ReplyDeleteIt's like say Fuck or something like this, but a little bit more formal.
And this "Oysters" it's only to laugh xD