Here following, 13 notable leading lines from works of fiction written in English, then fed into the Translation Party engine, chewed up and spit out. See if you can guess the origins of each. If you’re stuck, each result links to the original Translation Party page with the intact untranslated line at the top. If you’re not stuck enough, hover over each link and read my “helpful” “hints” in the ALT text.
Feel free to make astute guesses in comments. If you’re trying to puzzle stuff out, you may want to avoid the comments until you either finish or give up.
1) If you are a lucky owner and his wife, I know you must be a universal truth for you.
2) All complaints, each member of an unhappy family is in the family, in their own way are satisfied.
3) You are my adventures, I have read that this does not know the name of Tomusoya.
6) Between the thickness of the village Bakkumarigan Barerumiraboru Reiautouon stairs.
7) Temporarily, something really bad in the morning, ¶ Joseph, must be bound to honor him.
8) Products - many countries and people, including a diverse group of people. Backup to please.
9) This watch is 13 days, his 4-year-old is a bright cold day.
10) It is desirable that God knows everything.
11) Since then, my father and his young, I was dizzy and vulnerability advice.
#1 is Pride and Prejudice.
#2 is Anna Karenina.
That’s as far as I got.
But let’s just say that the title of this post refers to Moby Dick, and I won’t even check to see if I’m right.
Hrmm… Either Translation Party is not repeatable, or my guesses are wrong.
Apparently, by firing off a bunch of short comments one after another, I can post them in the wrong sequence.
You’re three for three, HP. Translation Party can give different results depending on punctuation and capitalization, it would seem. I got several different ones for #9 by leaving out the period and the comma in the original in various combinations.
3 is tom sawyer, which i only got because of the rollover.
4 is catcher in the rye.
6 ulysses (but only after looking at the english)
7 kafka: the trial?
12 oliver sachs. the man who mistook his wife for a hat
jean: very good! but try again on 12.
wait, and 3 you missed by a centimeter.
What a fun way to start my day. Thanks, Chris for the early morning smile.
Ha, Chris, when I found this site, your #1 was my first submission, too. But the result I got was completely different—something about a lucky man having his wife’s property.
As for your list: your title is from Moby DIck, #1 is Pride and Prejudice, and #2 is Anna Karenina, #3 is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, #9 is 1984, and I’m going to make a wild guess that #13 is Romeo and Juliet. But otherwise, I’m stumped.
“Since then, a long time, castle, bike, river, coast Bakkuhousu staff toilet has avoided a clergyman of Adam and Eve.”
What it is with Joyce and “Bakku” in Japanese? There’s nothing of the sort in the Wake. (Got to love how it translated the Latin “commodius vicus” into something along the lines of “pastor toilet.”)
That was awesome! Wow, the last line really blew up the translation engine :-P
Hmm, interesting. I tried some of my own, and my first attempt (“Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party”) ended up not stabilizing, but cycling between two different versions (“Currently, all people in the age of the right people, we will help the party” and “Currently, the right people in the age of all people, we will help the party”) without detecting the cycle. I think that’s sloppy programming.
It may have hung for you, Harald. I have gotten many of those endless loops you describe, and the app always throws up a message saying “looks like we’re never reaching resolution on this one” or something like that.