Let's play "Chinese translators"!

didine · Post by **didine** » 27 Dec 2004 12:56

Hello everyone,

You probably all know the principle of Chinese whispers: people are arranged in a circle, someone whispers a sentence to the person next to him/her, who then repeats it to the next person, etc. The last person says the sentence out loud, and in general it is somewhat different from the original sentence!

Sisyphe would like to launch a similar game:

Someone (in this case, Sisyphe) finds a text in French.

Translator 1 translates it from French into language A.
Translator 2 translates it from language A into language B.
Translator 3 translates it from language B into language C.
etc
The last translator translates the text from language X back into French.

Of course, the person who translates the text from e.g. B into C has seen the text neither in French, nor in A. As a consequence, we’ll have to play this game by sending each other private messages. Sisyphe will be the “coordinator” of this game.

When he has all the translations, he’ll post all the intermediary versions, and of course the comparison between the initial and final versions (note: you can’t be touchy when playing this game, we don’t want to hear any “It’s this so-and-so who mistranslated this”!).

The text will be literary in nature, but neither too hard, nor too long.

The first step is to create in advance a chain of translators. The hardest thing will be to have varied and, if possible, numerous, language combinations. From what language into what language do you feel able to translate a text?

Here are some examples of possible combinations:

Nephilim : Czech <-> Romanian
Svernoux : Russian/Ukrainian <-> German
Miguel : French <-> Portuguese
Gilen : virtually any language <-> virtually any language (Gilen, we really need you! ).
Zcalin : same as above
Caroline : French -> Modern Greek (and maybe Italien -> Modern Greek?)
Anthos : Modern Greek <-> English
Didine : Polish <-> Finnish

Those who would like to take part in this game are asked to post a message here. Please specify your language combination in your message (A into B, B into A, or A <-> B both ways).

didine · Post by **didine** » 05 Jan 2005 16:57

Hi again!

We still need participants!!! We already have a draft chain of translators, but we need people who can translate from or into:

- Danish
- Breton (or Gaelic)
- Thai
- Lao
- Polish, etc...

Those who would like to take part in this game are asked to post a message here.

didine · Post by **didine** » 30 Aug 2005 18:06

We're lauching a "new round"! If you're interested, post your language combination here: viewtopic.php?t=10565