It's the simple things in life, and I've always been a fan of translation errors. There's the perennial Engrish.com, and Revenge of the Sith becomes almost tolerable when watched as Star Wars: Backstroke Of The West. So I was especially ecstatic when my friend directed me to Convey This' Bad Translator, a site which will take any phrase and instantly bounce it through up to 56 languages of the Google Translator, which already isn't the most reliable tool at the best of times. And what comes out the other end is at best some delightful butchering of the original content or, more likely, complete gibberish leagues away from what you started with. So, for giggles, I decided to put a few comic-related phrases through to see what I got and post some of them here. Starting with Spidey's oft-repeated catchphrase:
We end up turning it into a sales pitch. Although, a decidedly not-inaccurate one. The skills and proportionate strength of a spider are certainly more advanced security features than you'd find on, say, some pepper spray or a taser, and Spider-Sense is probably far more functional in the case of a home invasion than ADT.
Jumping to Thor, it seems pretty handy that the inscription on the hammer of a Norse god is already in English. Hell, maybe it has it's own version of Google Translate built in, it does apparently come from a world where what our ancestors called magic and what we call science are one and the same (To go on a tangent for a second, the newest Thor trailer does look pretty damn awesome.). However, running the inscription through Bad Translator gives us:
Which, when applied in the original's place does not quite have the same godly oomph:
The Green Lantern oath is another one that works surprisingly well in English considering it is spoken in the many varied languages of the entire universe, especially seeing how it holds up against just 30 of the languages here on Earth. Though, pumping it into the translator, proves something I always suspected about DC:
It's always comes back to that goddamn Batman (It does, however, make the oath so much more polite; the "please" is an appreciated touch.).
Even the Batman himself, regardless of what color the space is outside, holds secrets within his distractingly simple catchphrase:
Suddenly, sending the phrase "I'm Batman" across the world, linguistically, turns it plural? Does that remind anyone of some recent events in Bruce Wayne's crusade against crime?
IT WAS THERE ALL ALONG, PEOPLE.
Back to Marvel, one of my favorite lines in the past decade came out of Warren Ellis' Nextwave. A series that I feel literally got better with every issue, issue ten of twelve was pretty damn close to the top of the run (beaten, obviously, by eleven and twelve respectively). Featuring Tabitha "Boom Boom" Smith taking down the mental powers of Forbush Man with the decided lack of mental prowess she possessed, she narrows down the details her victory to one simple phrase:
Putting this through the Bad Translator, however, provides this inexplicable result:
I seriously got nothing.
And lastly, one of the single greatest panels of all time, from Tarot #53:
Legally, I think have to link back to Chris Sims' Invincible Super-Blog any time this panel is mentioned, and I have to thank him here as much as Jim Balent for bringing this panel into the zeitgeist (which, while we're on the subject, translates to time-ghost, which presumably is not what's haunting Sam Brown's vagina). However, mining the joke further, putting this into the translator gives us this gem:
I will, Haunted Vagina. I will.
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