Tuesday 23 October 2007

Lied und tanzt

That title is probably very wrong German. Anyway, following last week's post in which I was waiting with some urgency for this week, it now appears that the release of Neubauten's new album has been delayed by another week or so.

Drat.

The only thing that's helping to pass the time is this. Hilarious, mesmeric and weird in equal measure.

16 comments:

Merkin said...

Roll on next week for your sake!!

My mother is a fan of Richard and Judy and they have a slot on their show which presents these kind of vids.

Charlotte said...

It's only very slightly wrong German, but the message is clear - pretty much how my German sounds to any native speaker. Tschuess!

trousers said...

Hi merk, actually I'm getting more patient as time passes: last week it was the pleasant surprise to find out that their lp was coming out, which got me hyped up. Now I've got used to the idea, and have videos such as this to entertain me :)

charlotte I'd be interested to know the correct phrase. I just put mine through one of those translation sites. Generally, the more text you put into them the wronger they get, which can be entertaining in its own way :)

Anonymous said...

Speaking as a professional translator, I don't think we have anything to worry about from machine translation yet.

I put the sentence "I wish I knew what it meant" through French and Greek back to English on Babelfish, and the result was "I wish that I have it knows that has meant this".

Knowing the original sentence, it's just about possible to draw a relationship in meaning. If you only had the result phrase to go on, I doubt anybody could really guess what it means.

trousers said...

No I don't think you've got anything to worry about szwag but I can imagine titles such as the one for this post becoming an annoyance in the same way that misplaced apostrophe's wind people up ;-)

Anonymous said...

Personally, I think it's time people recogni'sed that the apostrophe is dea'd.

Reading the Signs said...

Trousers, that is one very cool and funky cockatoo. And it's for real, isn't it - not trick photography? (I'm very gullible with these things).

trousers said...

Yes signs I gather it is for real, it's from a bird sanctuary apparently (there's a link on the page to their site).

Merkin said...

I have a site on Stumble Upon which plays that sort of game.

You can translate (say) from English to Polish to Korean to Swahili and back to English through a machine.

The results are truly wonderful.
*******
Further, when I put one scientific thesis through an ENGLISH grammar checker it stopped me at nearly every line.
In research stuff you very often write in the passive and I got picked up for this 'errant' style.

Needless to say it was a Microsoft product and the Yanks wanted me to be more direct.

Fire Byrd said...

You could get into grime whilst you're waiting!!
pxx

But Why? said...

Superb. I love the bit at the end where Snowball takes a bow. How fantastic is that?!

Anonymous said...

The M$ grammar checker is written for tiny minds by tiny minds.

I turned the damn thing off years ago.

zola a social thing said...

Titus groans agin as I learn English as a foreign language.

trousers said...

ROFL, zola!

Actually, I meant LEFL.

Damn, now I'm getting as obtuse as the great man himself (zola that is)

trousers said...

merkin and szwag, you've now got me playing silly games with translations into other languages and back into wronglish!

Reminds me of when you posted up that porno-language site, szwag.

Hi pixie, that's true enough, though I think I'm more likely to make a nascent exploration of the musical territory that is dubstep :)

Indeed, but why, he's a natural!

DJ Kirkby said...

Hilarious...but I must admit to mild dissapointment that it didn't shit on the chair...