Finnish Refined

[ellenkushner]

All right, wiseacres! OK, your Comments made me smirk, a lot - but my Finnish translator, Johanna Vainikainen-Uusitalo, has kindly set us all straight. Read her explanation here (and one from the actual Finnish reviewer, too! Wow, these folks are a friendly as you said they would be. Can't wait for Finncon!).

Poor GoogleTranslate - it tried. It doesn't really do metaphor.... Another review also praising the multiple viewpoints brings Gavin, Thomas, Meg & Elspeth from Elfland to the Airwaves as "four times a person's various audio tones transmitted clearly."

Comments

[elissa-carey.livejournal.com]

I think most of the online translators don't really do metaphor; they're stuck being literalist until a real person is able to look at it and say, "Oh no, we can't have that," and changes it. Which means we get to have all sorts of fun with literal translations! :D

[teriegarrison.livejournal.com]

A fellow tech writer once worked at a place where he had user guides for Japanese components. One of them had been machine-translated, and no one who knew ANY English (much less a native English speaker) looked over the results; they just published it. The machine translator universally translated the word 'screw' to, um, a word you would not expect to find in a user guide! ;-)

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

That is a beautiful thing.

[ckd]

Check out The Backstroke of the West (Star Wars Ep. III bootleg DVD, with "Englsih" (sic) subtitles translated back from Chinese)