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September 22, 2003

World News

Peter di Pietro points to Newstran, a service that aggregates and translates world news.

The translation can be pretty rough, although this is from Chinese and thus predictably is sense not much making going to:

?center port politics has the research ?Wang Yaozong ?with the above ?law, ?refers to Hong Kong ??weak ?, ?caused the Beijing port altogether to govern ?, but the port ?entire ?Deputy to the National People's Congress ?strength ?????law owed the principle ?, ??on "?the system" ?is fuzzy is the matter ?, but politics "?the system" ?had ?.

Aothough have to love a site that has as an entry in its pull down menu:

BULGARIAN >> ENGLISH - IT sux

It lets you use either Babelfish or WorldLingo as your renderer. Some of the languages are translated well enough to get a sense of the article. And when they don't, you're treated to tantalizing bits such as this from the Berliner Morgenpost:

Hans's acorn field man stands to Josef

In the preliminary investigation around compensations with the assumption of man man by Vodafone Hans's placed itself acorn behind German bank chief executive Josef field man

It turns out that Hans Eichel is opposing Josef Ackermann. "Eichel" is German for "acorn," so this is akin to Germans rendering a US headline about a cabinet meeting as "Grain Food advises Small Leafy Plant to Continue Policy towards Actually Exists."

Posted by D. Weinberger at September 22, 2003 09:14 AM


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» Found in translation: Bush speech at UN from Betsy Devine: Funny Ha-Ha or Funny Peculiar?
People talk about meanings lost in translation--how about translations that find something new? I mean, before David Weinberger read the world news in translation did he guess at the role of acorns in politics? Until I read a Portuguese translation of my [Read More]

Tracked on September 24, 2003 10:49 AM

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