Thursday, 29 September 2005

North South East and West

Leigh Blackall quoted a Google Chinese to English translation of the blog by Yoa Zhou. Let me try a human translation.

The blog title consists of two phrases: Freedom and being oneself.

Hi, lucky to meet you here. What a chance!,

An educational movement using Podcast.

A crash of civilisaton is being acted out in Iraq, what a human tragedy! East and West requires more exchange, so is North and South. Let podcast and RSS lead us towards freedom.

(Looks like a slogan, but this will do for the time being. May change it in the future.)


The mistakes in Google's translation is in this sentence: "Broadcasts the guest educates the movement":

  • "broadcasts the guest" is the reverse translation of "podcast". (Obviously podcast is a new term from the West. When it was translated back from Chinese into English, it became this funny form.)

  • "Educational (adjective) Movement (noun)" was incorrectly translated as "educates the movement". Here, the characters for "educate" should be used as adjective to describe the movement which follows. But the Google translator treated them as verb and hence became "educates" (the verb) the movement (the object)"


  • The rest of the translation is quite understandable!

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