Broken Translation Game 2017

[Luís]

It's been a while (years?) since last edition, so I hope we can make it work this time

For the new people who've never participated, this game is similar to the Broken Telephone game, but with texts.

Person A translates the original English text into Language 1
Person B translates Language 1 into Language 2
...
Person X translates Language n back into English (and this is the resulting text)

Rules
- Once you receive the text, you will have 5 days to complete the translation into the designated target language.
- You may not use online/automated translators like Google Translate or BabelFish.
- The translation must be completed by yourself
- Failure to complete the translation within the time-frame without explanation will result in expulsion from the game.
- When you complete a translation, you need to forward the correct language version to the next person in the chain.
- Please also send a carbon-copy (CC) to me when you send it. This is important.
- You must not discuss the text with anyone else in the chain/game until the game has finished.
- Once the game has entirely finished, the results will be posted

So, if you want to participate, just reply to this thread and mention the language pairs you're willing to translate to/from. For instance:

English -> Spanish
English -> Japanese
English -> Arabic
Spanish -> English
German -> Spanish

It won't be a long text, nothing more than a small paragraph.

CHAIN

English -> Turkish (Elaine) -> Belarusian (voron) -> Spanish (Irusia) -> Italian (Ipsedixit) -> Mandarin Chinese (vijayjohn) -> Portuguese (Covered) -> French (dEhiN) -> Dutch (Aurinĭa)> German (Car) -> Irish (kevin) -> English (księżycowy)

[księżycowy]

Heck, I'll give this a try. If I understand correctly, you pick languages you're not very fluent in, right? Hence the "broken" part, right?

[Luís]

On the contrary, you're supposed to only pick languages you know more or less well

Trust me, even if you speak a language perfectly, once a text has been translated several times between different languages (especially if the languages are quite different from each other) weird stuff is guaranteed to pop up...

[księżycowy]

Oh, my mistake. I suppose I'll have to sit out until I get a bit better than.

[Luís]

You can always translate from a given language into English, if that's easier (you only need a passive knowledge). It's not going to be a hard text.

[księżycowy]

Make up your mind, man!

I did think this would be a good challenge to begin with, and it would probably be easier to go from whatever to English.

Sign me up for
Japanese -> English
Irish -> English
Hebrew -> English
(I know, not that much of a list, and they aren't that widely know across the forum)

[Car]

English -> German
French -> German
Spanish -> German
German -> English

[voron]

From and to:
Turkish
Kurdish (Kurmanji)
BSC
Russian
Belarusian

Only from:
Arabic (MSA, Levantine)
Ukrainian
Polish
Romanian

[Multiturquoise]

Turkish<->English

[Luís]

Also, here's an example of the final result of the game (1st edition back in 2006 )

[kevin]

We don't want every other language in the chain to be English, so I'll just offer from and to for all of them, even though translating to Dutch and especially Irish would probably contribute much to the "broken" part:

German
English
Dutch
Irish

[księżycowy]

We don't want every other language in the chain to be English, so I'll just offer from and to for all of them, even though translating to Dutch and especially Irish would probably contribute much to the "broken" part

That's a good point.

I know I wouldn't be able to translate well into Japanese, but I do understand Hebrew and Irish well enough to offer either way with them. With the same disclaimer as Kevin.
Irish to or from Hebrew would be quite interesting.
So:
Japanese (from only)
Irish
Hebrew
English

[Luís]

We don't want every other language in the chain to be English

We need a few more people in order to avoid that. I wonder if nobody else is interested or if they simply don't visit this part of the forum...

At the moment I can think of a chain like this:

English -> Turkish (voron) -> English (Elaine) -> German (Car) -> Irish (kevin) -> English (księżycowy)

But I don't like all that English at the beginning... it would be great if we can put someone in between (but I also don't want to waste Turkish, since it's different enough from English to cause translation issues )

Anyway, only 5 people so far. I think we'd need at least 8 or so for a proper chain...

[voron]

But I don't like all that English at the beginning...

I can do translations to and from Italian (not interested in improving it atm so I didn't mention it), but that wouldn't help as noone has signed up for Italian so far...

I wonder if Vijay has seen this topic. I'm sure we can use him to insert a missing link anywhere in the chain.

[księżycowy]

I've been shamelessly promoting this thread in my signature.

[Luís]

I wonder if Vijay has seen this topic. I'm sure we can use him to insert a missing link anywhere in the chain.

I've been shamelessly promoting this thread in my signature.

I normally use the "New posts" feature, so I see a list of everything's that's new since my last visit. But I know many people only visit certain sub forums and completely ignore others (e.g. Politics & Religion).

[Aurinĭa]

We don't want every other language in the chain to be English

We need a few more people in order to avoid that. I wonder if nobody else is interested or if they simply don't visit this part of the forum...

At the moment I can think of a chain like this:

English -> Turkish (voron) -> English (Elaine) -> German (Car) -> Irish (kevin) -> English (księżycowy)

But I don't like all that English at the beginning... it would be great if we can put someone in between (but I also don't want to waste Turkish, since it's different enough from English to cause translation issues )

Anyway, only 5 people so far. I think we'd need at least 8 or so for a proper chain...

Give it a bit more time! It's only been two days.
Personally, I'm still wondering whether to participate or sit it out this time round; and if I do, to/from which languages. Though unless someone offers to do a North-Germanic language, most of my languages would be useless anyway.

I normally use the "New posts" feature, so I see a list of everything's that's new since my last visit. But I know many people only visit certain sub forums and completely ignore others (e.g. Politics & Religion).

So do I, but it's easy to miss a thread in that list and then never notice it because you never check out individual subforums.

[vijayjohn]

I wonder if Vijay has seen this topic. I'm sure we can use him to insert a missing link anywhere in the chain.

No, I didn't realize there was a game like this on UniLang! I mean, I probably should've guessed, but I've played this exact same game before on another forum. Maybe I could try joining in!

Luís, when we PM you our translations, do we each need to include a translation of our translation into English as well?

[dEhiN]

Vijay, what are your language pairs?

I guess I could do to/from:

English
French

and from:
Spanish
Portuguese

[vijayjohn]

Vijay, what are your language pairs?

Whatever you want them to be?