Superman never made any money for saving the world from Solomon Grundy

Monday, July 18, 2016

Il est une perplexité

So, a friend currently in Canada posted a thing on Facebook and, as is often the case, the teaser was in both French and English.

On a whim, I clicked the Translate button that FB has; the English version stayed the same, of course, but the French version was translated slightly differently.

This was mildly interesting, so I cut and pasted the French version into Google Translate, and got yet another version.

Here they are:

Original English:

Facebook translation of original French:

Google Translation of original French:

So, we have
  • For / no preposition / To
  • have / live with / live with
  • check / try / try
  • work out / exercise / exercise
  • wonderful / really great / super
and so on.

I don't know enough about French to make any comments on the translations, but I do know enough about English to say that the original English version is the worst. "Check this type of work out" is just wrong - it seems to indicate that I am to consider a category of employment. For clarity, the sentence should read "Check out this type of workout" or "Check this type of workout out," neither of which is euphonious. And "A blend of ballet dance and Tai Chi movements" makes me think there's a comma missing - does anyone say "ballet dance" as a thing? It almost seems to me that this is a bad translation of something that was originally written in French.

For my Francophone friends, here's the Original French version. What do you think?

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