Tuesday, February 01, 2011

Google Translate fail, and another translation pun?

This sentence from page 7 Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

“他们说,” 她不依不饶地说,“昨天夜里伏地魔绕到高锥克山谷。他们是去找波特夫妇的,谣传莉莉和詹姆·波特都——都——他们都已经——死了。”
Translated by google as

"They say, "she said Buyiburao, "last night Voldemort went around to the high cone grams of the valley. They are the couple went to Porter, rumors Lily and James Potter are - are - they have been - dead. "
The pinyin from google is

“Tāmen shuō,” tā bùyī bù ráo de shuō,“zuótiān yèlǐ fúdì mó rào dào gāo zhuī kè shāngǔ. Tāmen shì qù zhǎo bō tè fūfù de, yáochuán lìlì hé zhān mǔ·bō tè dōu——dōu——tāmen dōu yǐjīng ——Sǐ le.”
Again this is kind of interesting. First, because I take 不依不饶地 to mean something like relentlessly or mercilessly, but google fails to translate it. But then the translator uses the character 绕 in 绕到高锥克山谷 (高锥克山谷=Godric's Hollow).

It seems like 不依不饶地 is a bit unusual since google translate fails. So the occurrence of 饶 and the subsequent 绕 seems unlikely. Is there something going on here, i.e. is the use of 绕 a (visual and aural) pun on the previous use of 饶? It seems that if there is, what in English would be called, a "play on words," then in Chinese the characters allow both aural and visual puns.

A question for native speakers.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

A similar question about a possible pun posed in the comments section of this previous post
http://wenxihanyu.blogspot.com/2010/12/fun-with-machine-translation.html

10:07 AM  

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