The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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8:27am on Thursday, 7th November, 2013:
Weird
"Out of sight, out of mind" -> Russian -> English -> "Blind idiot".
When I was doing my PhD, there used to be this example given of machine translation gone wrong. It was supposedly apocryphal, but may have had a truthful origin somewhere along the line in manual translation. The premise was that you took something in one language, translated it into another, then translated it back, then compared it with the original.
This morning, my Google vanity search pulled up an article that seems to have been written using this method. The headline is:
'I'd Near Planet Of Warcraft!' MUD Creator Richard Bartle On The Point out Of Virtual Worlds
This headline is a translation-mangling of an interview I did in 2007 that was headlined:
'I'd close World of Warcraft!' MUD creator Richard Bartle on the state of virtual worlds
Close/near, state/point out...
The rest of it has some amusing substitutions, too, presumably to avoid copyright or plagiarism claims. Not that I've seen this kind of thing before or anything.
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Copyright © 2013 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).