Blind Idiot Translation/Oral Tradition

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Anecdotes the People of (Folklore)

  • There's the wonderful urban legend that the advertising slogan "Come alive with the Pepsi Generation!" was mistranslated in China as "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead."
  • Allegedly, the expression "Out of sight, out of mind" was once translated from English to Russian, and then back into English. It became "invisible idiot", which makes sense really.
    • As of October 2009, trying this with the Babel Fish online translator yields the utterly incomprehensible result "From the eyes down, from the heart there."[1]
    • As of early 2023, Google Translate passes this test perfectly, translating "Out of sight, out of mind" into "С глаз долой, из сердца вон", which it will then happily translate back to the original English.
  1. ↑ It got translated into the equivalent Russian idiom (which literally means something like "away from the eyes, out of the heart") and then word-by-word back into English.
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