It’s been awhile since I wrote an April Fool’s Day blog to be translated into another language. I wonder if I should do it again?
Every year for a couple of years a couple of years ago I would write one of these blogs, use Google to translate it into some bizarre language, and then post it on April Fools’ Day, along with an easter egg stuck in the middle of the blog that might allow you to discover how to translate it back. I’ve put these into Dutch, Icelandic, Swahili; and Klingon, among others, and the results were always interesting.
Very, very interesting.
The funniest thing actually seemed to happen on April 2nd, when I translated the blogs from whatever language they were translated into back into English. Often times, the phrases are twisted and mangled; for instance, going from English to Dutch and back to English, the phrase “April Fools’ Day” came back as “the day of the gelukkige scatterbrains of April”. Of course, the surprising thing is that English and Dutch are literary cousins--they’re both Germanic languages--and the fact that it translated back so poorly came as a bit of a shock. And a rather big laugh, at least on my part. And that was even before Icelandic and Klingon changed a whole bunch of meanings.
If you think I have a strange way of writing now, you should see what it was like after being translated to Klingon (and back)!
I'll give it some thought over the weekend, and if I decide to do it, you'll see the results next Thursday and Friday. Of course, it won't be much of an April Fools' joke, because you're already in on it, but who knows—maybe that'll make it that much stranger.
You never know...
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