This morning Joe Gandelman of The Moderate Voice linked to a list of amusing mis-translations into English.
In response I’d like to introduce you to the greatest and one of the most famous of all mis-translations, the fabulous, inscrutable, eerily musical English As She Is Spoke. The book, which was actually used as an English textbook in some parts of the world, was produced by taking a fairly competent Portuguese-French phrasebook and transliterating the French into English using a French-English dictionary. The work, attributed to Jose Fonseca, is unlikely to have been the work of the poor maligned man since Fonseca actually spoke English and it’s hard to see how anyone who actually had any familiarity with English (or French, for that matter) could have produced such a thing.
The results have some similarity to the results of dragging a text in English into, say, Chinese using BabelFish and then back again. But EASIS has a poetry and music that can only be the product of a conscious mind.
For the details on the history of EASIS see here. The full text is here. It caught the attention of Sam Clemens (Mark Twain) who wrote of it:
Many persons have believed that this book’s miraculous stupidities were studied and disingenuous; but no one can read the volume carefully through and keep that opinion. It was written in serious good faith and deep earnestness, by an honest and upright idiot who believed he knew something of the English language, and could impart his knowledge to others. The amplest proof of this crops out somewhere or other upon each and every page. There are sentences in the book which could have been manufactured by a man in his right mind, and with an intelligent and deliberate purposes to seem innocently ignorant; but there are other sentences, and paragraphs, which no mere pretended ignorance could ever achieve– nor yet even the most genuine and comprehensive ignorance, when unbacked by inspiration.
It is not a fraud who speaks in the following paragraph of the author’s Preface, but a good man, an honest man, a man whose conscience is at rest, a man who believes he has done a high and worthy work for his nation and his generation, and is well pleased with his performance:
“We expect then, who the little book (for the care what we wrote him, and for her typographical correction) that may be worth the acceptation of the studious persons, and especially of the Youth, at which we dedicate him particularly.”
Here are a few excerpts. From the section “Familiar Phrasesâ€:
-Go to send for.
-Have you say that?
-Have you understand that he says?
-At what purpose have say so?
-Put your confidence in my.
-At what o’clock dine him?
-Apply you at the study during that you are young.
–Dress your hairs.
-Sing an area.
-These apricots and these peaches make me and to come water in the mouth.
-How do you can it to deny?
–Wax my shoes.
-This is that I have think.
-That are the dishes whose you must be and to abstain.
-This meat ist not too over do.
-This ink is white.
–This room is filled of bugs.
-This girl have a beauty edge.
-It is a noise which to cleave the head.
-This wood is full of thief’s.
-Tell me, it can one to know?
-Give me some good milk newly get out.
-To morrow hi shall be entirely (her master) or unoccupied.
-She do not that to talk and to cackle.
–Dry this wine.
-He laughs at my nose, he jest by me.
and from the wonderfully inscrutable section, “Proverbs and Idiotismsâ€:
The necessity don’t know the low.
Few, few the bird make her nest.
He is not valuable to breat that he eat.
Its are some blu stories.
Nothing some money, nothing of Swiss.
He sin in trouble water.
A bad arrangement is better than a process.
In the country of blinds, the one eyed man are kings.
To build castles in Espagnish.
Cat scalded fear the cold water.
To do the fine spirit.
With a tongue one go to Roma.
There is not any ruler without a exception.
Take out the live coals with the hand of the cat.
A horse bared don’t look him the tooth.
Take the occasion for the hairs.
So many go the jar to spring, than at last rest there.
