Blog News

1. Comments are still disabled though I am thinking of enabling them again.

2. There are now several extra pages - Poetry Index, Travel, Education, Childish Things - accessible at the top of the page. They index entires before October 2013.

3. I will, in the next few weeks, be adding new pages with other indexes.

Sunday, 6 February 2011

Negation Translation

Because I was feeling lazy this morning I used Google Translate to translate a short poem in German that I came across on another site. One of the lines in the middle was

das Leben bewegt sich nicht zurück, jemals

which I would translate as, "life doesn't move backwards, ever" or maybe, because it sounds better in English "life never moves backwards"

Google Translate messed up the negation and rendered it as

"life moves back, do not ever" so that the negation then attached itself to the next line.

Doesn't that sort of reverse the meaning?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

How interesting a development. How challenging a thought; being able to move back, yet being warned not to.
This surely makes me think much.

Thank you for this honour. Please have a good Tuesday.

daily athens