Sunday, March 14, 2010
Hilarious translating mistakes
Blogger island1 of Polandian has a funny post about annoying mistakes made by Polish translators. My personal favorite didn't make his list, so I'll write about it here instead. It's the assumption that if a certain English word closely resembles some Polish word, it has to have a similar meaning. For example, English word eventually looks a lot like the Polish word ewentualnie. The problem is that ewentualnie does not mean eventually; it means possibly. Therefore, lazy translating from English to Polish can lead to unwittingly hilarious sentences like "We will all die possibly." Another, even funnier example is the English word lunatic. There's a Polish word, lunatyk, that looks similar to it (and has almost identical pronunciation). But, lunatyk doesn't mean lunatic; instead, it means sleepwalker. This accidental similarity leads to translation gems like "He's a raging sleepwalker."
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