Coolmacatrain
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2021–2026
1:58 · 234K views · Mar 16, 2019
The Monty Python sketch "Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook", in which a faulty phrasebook yields lines like "My hovercraft is full of eels".
Posted as a joke reply in threads about translation, language, and machine-translation failures.
4 comments from Hacker News
mid == clueless == interchangeable, and interchangeable means the only thing keeping them in the Outer Party is loyalty (partly demonstrated through diligent observance of the rituals). The principal was either in the habit of referring to people however he wishes, or perhaps he was even being accommodating and referring to his counterparts as they wished to be addressed; the translator was in the habit that one must always use the politically correct forms — to the point that the faithfulness to conditioning resulted in a betrayal of the translation. "A translation is like a romantic partner: almost all are either beautiful, or they are faithful; rarely are they both" lagniappe: this video
Yep as sibling comment says I was riffing on 'my hovercraft is full of eels' [0], meaning to say that that's probably what me trying to ask questions on a hypothetical 'Hindi StackOverflow' would sound like. [0] - this video
If they do it through translation it'd be hilarious. When we get tech support queries in languages like Arabic we pass them through Google Translate and the result always makes me think of this: this video
After just 5 hours on a Duolingo Max I have become fluent at useful everyday language needs, behold: this video