Language. Chaos. Occasional insight.
Articles about language, translation, and the quirks of machine learning.
The Translation Telephone Game: How a Schoolyard Classic Grew Up
The telephone game is called something different in every country — Stille Post, téléphone arabe, kulaktan kulağa. Here's how the schoolyard classic grew up into Translation Mixer.
How a Rat Became Mosquitoes: Tracing a Translation Chain Gone Wrong
A Smashing Pumpkins lyric sent through ten languages — Twi, Hunsrik, Krio, Quechua, and more — came back as mosquitoes. We ran it four times. Here's exactly where the rat disappeared.
Loanwords and How They Change Language
English borrowed 'schadenfreude' from German and 'tsunami' from Japanese. Here's what happens when loanwords travel back through a translation chain.
Life in Your Years: Commas Save Lives. They Also Save Quotes.
One missing period turned a Lincoln quote into a contradiction. How punctuation (or the lack of it) breaks translation chains in unexpected ways.
Shakespeare: True or False?
'To be or not to be, that is the question' — sent through 5 languages — came back as 'True or false, what's the problem?' Here's why.
The Complexities of Language: Which Languages Are Hardest to Translate?
Finnish, Japanese, Mandarin — why some languages break translation chains faster than others, plus Macbeth and David Bowie to prove the point.
The Duck Song Goes Through the Mixer
Bryant Oden's Duck Song — sent through Acehnese, Dutch, Acholi, Belarusian, and Arabic. The duck still wants grapes. Mostly.
How Translation Mixer Was Born: A Pandemic Story
How Translation Mixer started: a pandemic, two laughing kids, and a chain of Google Translate tabs that produced something inexplicably funny.
A Brief History of Machine Translation
From the Cold War to ChatGPT — 75 years of trying to teach machines to translate. The stranger-than-fiction history of machine translation.
Why Machine Translation Humor Works
Why does a bad translation make you lose it? Incongruity theory, lossy compression, and the linguistic reasons mistranslation is so reliably funny.