[kj] Killing Language

[Bo Krogsgaard]

On Thu, 27 Nov 2003, Gabriella Wing=E5rdh wrote:

> (* Don=B4t know if you speak any Swedish, but let=B4s say "Twist and Shou=
t" literally, would be something like "Skruva och skrik", which in English,=
 translated back, could result in something like "Screw and Scream")

My former roommate and i have this common friend who is French but has
lived in Denmark for .. fifteen years maybe. One night we took sentences
like "my hovercraft is full of eels" and went to babelfish.altavista.com
and translated each of them to French and back like five times, then sent
them to said French guy on ICQ.

He really TRIED to understand what we were saying, until he figured out
that my former roommate and i in the same room would mean we were stinking
drunk and taking the piss out of him. Took him a while to figure out
though. DAMNED i wish i had the logs of that night.

On a WHOLE different note, a few of you maybe used BBS systems back in the
old days with dialup modems. There was this quite good BBS software
package called RemoteAccess, which was also one of the first BBS systems
that shipped with menus in multiple languages.

Whatever idiot translated it to Danish should be shot. He had consequently
translated the word "thread" with the word for "threat", so it had the
most violent message board system in BBS history ("previous message in
threat, next threat, search for messages in threat, start new threat" and
so on). And the Danish words ("tr=E5d" and "trussel") are so far from
eachother that this cannot be a simple mistake, it's a proper fuckup.


b