What is Translation Mixer?
It’s a telephone game for languages. Type something in, send it on a wild ride through a chain of languages, and see what comes out the other end. Sometimes it’s poetic. Sometimes it’s nonsense. Always entertaining.
Inspired by Twisted Translations
This whole thing started because of Twisted Translations, a brilliant YouTube channel that takes songs, movie quotes, and pop culture and runs them through Google Translate over and over until they come out as something completely unrecognisable — and hilarious. If you haven’t watched it, go do that first. We’ll wait.
Watch Twisted TranslationsHow It Works
Type any text into the translator. Choose how many languages you want it to pass through — or let us pick randomly. We send your text through each language one at a time using Google Translate and/or Microsoft Azure Translator, and show you the final result along with the full journey it took.
The more languages in the chain, the more dramatic the drift. Five languages might give you something poetic. Ten might give you something completely unrecognisable. That’s the fun of it.
We Also Run Experiments With It
Translation Mixer is a toy, but it turns out to be a usable instrument. Because every hop is logged, we can run the same text through controlled language chains and measure what actually changes. Everything below is our own data, collected with this tool and published in full:
- We round-tripped one paragraph through 20 languages and scored the damage. Japanese did the most; Finnish, which everyone expects to break translators, placed 19th of 20.
- We collected the word for “gray” in 52 languages and found that at least eight unrelated language families build it from their word for ash.
- We sent 78 words through ten languages to see which ones survive perfectly. 35 came home untouched. “Tea” came home as a car.
- We recreated history’s most famous mistranslations in modern machine translation. Five of eight still fail the same way.
No result on this site is invented or hand-edited. If a chain is quoted, it came out of the mixer exactly as printed, and the post says which translation engine produced it and when. Read them all in Field Notes.
Built by Jeremy Lemley — Lemley Tech
My name is Jeremy. I’m a software developer and IT professional based in the United States with over a decade of experience building web applications, managing infrastructure, and working with APIs at scale. I built Translation Mixer because I wanted to turn a hobby — watching machine translation fail in increasingly absurd ways — into something other people could enjoy.
The frontend is built with React and Next.js. The translation engine runs on a custom Go backend that chains Google Translate and Microsoft Azure Translator API calls sequentially, routes each hop to whichever provider supports it, handles rate limiting, and stores saved translations for registered users.
To learn more, check out How Translation Mixer Was Born. For questions or feedback, use the Contact page. Happy Mixing!
Translation Mixer is an independent side project. It uses the Google Translate and Microsoft Azure Translator APIs for translations and Claude by Anthropic for AI assistance. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, or Twisted Translations.