The Korean Connection
Everyone needs to know about this. I’m talking about a website. To be honest, and possibly libellous, the website is babelfish.altavista.com. This site enables you to translate text between different languages such as French, Spanish, Italian, German. Oh, and Korean.
Now, I’m not for a minute denigrating this marvellous tool – it has provided both accurate translations (in the case of our European languages) and hours of giggling, foolish fun. I’ll explain the procedure.
Sounds simple? It is. Here’s a demonstration:
I typed in:
“Ha! That's a poor excuse. Now, where the hell are my silver ferns, hash boy? I ejected three swans because of this incident!”
‘I wonder what that phrase is, in Korean’, wondered I.
It’s “헬기공격 ! 저것은 가난한 변명 이다. 지금, 어디에 나락 나 의 은 고비, 음식은 소년 인가? 나는 사마리의 백조를 때문에 이 사건의 분출했다 !”
That doesn’t help much.
‘OK, I’ll just translate that back into English…’
“Helicopter attack! That is the vindication which is poor. Now, are the hell my silver climax and the food the boy to where? I four hundred at this event gushed in order to beg!”
I wondered exactly why one would have to ‘gush’ in order to beg, at an event of four hundred, no less. But anyway, this was just a test run. I wanted to write a letter to Pablo, a half-Spanish half-Korean I knew. I wanted to impress him with my grasp of Korean, picked up during my stay with him. So I wrote this:
“Dear
Pablo,
I am
writing to thank you for the wonderful time I had with you in your
beach
house in Korea. I especially enjoyed catching, cutting open and
cooking
the fresh fish, and sharing the meal with your dog. This is an
episode
in my life that will provide me with lasting memories.
Yours, Quebly.”
I translated this to Korean, and sent it on its way.
Three months later, I still hadn’t heard from Pablo. Idly, I wondered if I had offended him in some way with the content of my letter, so I translated the Korean back to English. Now I knew why Pablo had broken off all contact…
“Going
out and inside Korea with you wondering which it has lop hour in
your
seashore household and above and and the Pablo which is valuable,
I am
bitter. I seized, being special, to be opened i was to cut and the
freshness
one fish under cooking, and it shares a repast in your dog,
it
enjoyed. This the chaff the blood smallness tu is inside my lifetime
will provide to me in vulgar memory. Your thing and quebly.”
I am looking forward to the day when we speak but one language.