5-15-2011

I discovered a wonderful thing called Google Translate! I cannot believe how much fun it is. I think you can translate between 49 languages, or something like that. Anyhow, I have taken up the habit of translating my book into French, and then back into English. When I do this, it fills in some of the words with the closest match it can find (sometimes the translation of a word isn’t an exact definition with the original input, and reversing the translation will give you the exact definition in English). I made an amazing realization this morning as well. I was reading the English-French-English translation for Chapter II (some of the stuff it comes up with is so funny, I’ll put in examples in a bit), and where Tanner was supposed to say “How else would you get to an afterlife kingdom?”, it said “How else would you get to the realm beyond?” (all lowercase). I, for the life of me, could not figure out why it said realm beyond where it was supposed to say afterlife kingdom. So I went back online to Google Translate, set it for English to French translation, and typed in “afterlife kingdom.” The result was Royaume-delà. I copied this into the text box and changed the translation to French to English. The result said “realm beyond.” I couldn’t believe it! Who would have thought that the exact French translation for afterlife kingdom means realm beyond! It’s astounding, because nowhere in the phrase “realm beyond” does it mention an afterlife. I still can’t get over it! It’s amazing how things work out like that. The Realm Beyond was not a planned title, it just sort of stuck. I’m in awe.

Here are a few examples that cracked me up:

“Makeshift noose” was translated into “Rope of fortune”

“She can’t have gotten far” turned to “It cannot be obtained until now”

“Just be still, okay?” turned to “Just do it again, okay?”

“Thank you, Sir” turned to “Thank you, Mr. President”

One from another book that really cracked me up was Poppa turned into Cushy. So the line “I’m not Poppa,” is now “I’m not Cushy.”