Language. Chaos. Occasional insight.
This is the Translation Mixer blog — field notes from running a translation telephone game in production. We break down real translation chains hop by hop to find exactly where meaning fell apart, stress-test the “hardest” languages with repeatable experiments, and write up what seventy years of machine translation history looks like when you poke it with a stick. Every mangled sentence you’ll read here is real output from the mixer — nothing is invented, which is somehow what makes it funnier.
New posts land a few times a month. Start with a featured remix if you want the comedy, or the linguistics posts if you want to know why the comedy works.
Translators Fix "It's Paws" Every Time. "Over Their" Is Another Story.
Every translator we tested fixed "it's paws." Then we tried "I left my keys over their," and most of them put the keys on top of somebody.
The Same Sentence Costs Five Times More in Russian Than in Chinese
The same sentence through four languages billed 348 characters via Russian and 164 via Chinese. What a translation app really costs, and what broke.
The Oxford Comma Is the Only Punctuation Mark That Doesn't Survive Translation
Drop the comma from "eats, shoots and leaves" and all 9 languages we tested noticed. Drop the Oxford comma from a dedication and none did. Here's why.
Klingon Broke Our Damage Record. Then It Translated Hamlet Perfectly.
Klingon returned Hamlet's most famous line word for word, then did more damage to an ordinary paragraph than any language we have ever tested.
Words That Survive Translation Perfectly (and the Science of Why)
"OK" lasted five hops and came back as "show." We ran 78 words through translation chains: borrowed words beat basics, and tea came home as a car.
How to Say Gray in 52 Languages (and Why Half of Them Disagree About Colors)
Gray is the color of ash in at least eight unrelated language families. The word in 52 languages, plus the exact hop where a gray cat turned green.
We Typed "idk tbh, hbu?" Into a Translator and It Came Back West Frisian
We ran 49 abbreviations through a translator. 15 were detected as other languages, "lol" came back as "Very funny," and one real word fixes it.
Thunder Mug to Rizz: We Ran a Century of Slang Through a Translator
Old slang and new slang survived machine translation about equally. What decides it is whether the slang is one word or a metaphor.
Finnish and Hungarian Don't Break Translators. Everyone Assumes They Do.
Finnish has fifteen grammatical cases and finished 19th of 20 for translation damage. Why hard for learners is not hard for machines.
Why Machine Translation Still Struggles With Japanese
Japanese did more damage than 19 other languages in our round-trip test: invented pronouns, deleted counters, and a polite phrase that didn't survive.
We Round-Tripped One Paragraph Through 20 Languages. Here's the Damage Ranking.
One paragraph, 20 languages, one round trip each. Japanese did the most damage, Finnish placed 19th, and a second engine reshuffled the ranking.
Famous Mistranslations in History, Recreated
Will famous translation disasters still fail in modern translation engines? Spoiler: 5 of 8 still fail, including "We will bury you" and Moses' horns.
All Your Base Are Belong to Us: Gaming's Greatest Mistranslation, Rerun in 2026
Modern machine translation gets Zero Wing's original Japanese right. Fed back through the mixer, "All your base are belong to us" became gardening.
How to Play the Google Translate Telephone Game (With or Without Friends)
How to play the Google Translate telephone game three ways: solo copy-paste, a party version with scoring and a printable kit, or one click.
Translation Telephone: 25 Sentences That Fell Apart Spectacularly
"I'll be back" went through a translation chain and came home as a clergyman named Father Goshen. 25 real chains and the wreckage they left.
Google Translate API Rate Limits Explained (and the "User Rate Limit Exceeded" Error)
What userRateLimitExceeded and 429 errors mean, how Google's character quotas work, backoff code that works, and our $6 overnight bill.
The Translation Telephone Game: How a Schoolyard Classic Grew Up
Stille Post, téléphone arabe, kulaktan kulağa: the telephone game has a name in every country. How the schoolyard classic became Translation Mixer.
How a Rat Became Mosquitoes: Tracing a Translation Chain Gone Wrong
A Smashing Pumpkins lyric went through ten languages and came back as mosquitoes. We ran the same chain four times and found where the rat vanished.
Loanwords: 30 Words English Stole From Other Languages
France refused "faux pas" and Italy disowned "fiasco." We sent 18 words English borrowed back through their home languages. Here's what survived.
Shakespeare: True or False?
"To be or not to be, that is the question" went through five languages and came back as "True or false, what's the problem?" Here's where it turned.
What's the Hardest Language to Translate? (We Tested Them All)
Finnish, with fifteen grammatical cases, came back untouched. Japanese did the most damage. We round-tripped one sentence through six hard languages.
How Translation Mixer Was Born: A Pandemic Story
It started with a pandemic, two laughing teenagers and a pile of Google Translate tabs. Rerun today, their game moved a rowboat to the Euphrates.
The History of Machine Translation, Recreated: One Sentence Through Every Era
Legend says a 1954 computer turned "the spirit is willing" into "the vodka is good." We tried it and found the breaking point.
Why Machine Translation Humor Works
Why machine translation is funny: incongruity theory, compounding drift, and why the machine's mistakes are funnier because they aren't mistakes at all.