How a Rat Became Mosquitoes: Tracing a Translation Chain Gone Wrong

Featured Remix · Field Notes

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Somewhere between English and Quechua, a rat became a mosquito.

Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Just… through ten languages, one probabilistic guess at a time, a caged rat from a Smashing Pumpkins song ended up as an insect that someone, for reasons the chain could not fully explain, had caught.

We're going to figure out exactly how that happened.

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The original

"Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage."

You know this one. 1995. Billy Corgan. Pure idiom — there's no actual rat, no actual cage. It means trapped, powerless, furious despite everything. Anyone who's ever been stuck in a bad job, a bad situation, a bad decade, knows exactly what it means.

Which is precisely why it's a terrible thing to put into a translation chain.

Idioms don't translate. They dissolve. And what fills the space they leave behind is where things get interesting.

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The path

Ten languages: Twi → Hunsrik → Hiligaynon → Krio → Malay → Pangasinan → Scots Gaelic → Fulani → Quechua → English.

We ran it four times. Same languages, same order, no changes. Here's every step of every run:

A mosquito. Some wolves. A snake. A different mosquito.

Same input. Same languages. Four completely different animals — well, three animals and a repeat insect. Let's go find the rat.

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The crime scene, hop by hop

Stop 1 — English → Twi: the rat is replaced

Twi is an Akan language spoken in Ghana. When it encounters "rat in a cage," it reaches for the closest creature concept it has — and what comes out is closer to wolf or dog than rat.

Wɔ m'abufuw nyinaa akyi no, meda so ara yɛ ɔkraman a ɔwɔ afiri mu ara kwa

Back-translated: "Despite all my anger, I am still just a dog/wolf in a trap."

The rat is gone. It died at the first hop. Every language that follows is translating a wolf.

Stop 2 — Twi → Hunsrik: surprisingly decent

Hunsrik is a German dialect spoken in southern Brazil, which is exactly as unexpected as it sounds. And it actually handles this reasonably well:

Fer al mayn wuut, sin ich imer noch ploos en wolf in en khaste

"For all my rage, I am still just a wolf in a box/cage." The structure holds. The emotion holds. It's the wrong animal, but the sentence is intact. This is the chain doing its best.

Stop 3–4 — Hiligaynon, then Krio: the subject flips

Hiligaynon (spoken in the Philippines) keeps the wolf-in-a-cage idea mostly together — the only variation across runs is whether it includes the word "still." Stable enough. Then the sentence reaches Krio — an English-based creole from Sierra Leone — and something goes grammatically sideways.

Runs 1 & 4: Fo ol mai anger, a jos bi kech wolf — "I just catch wolf" Run 2: Fo ol mai rage, a stil bi jos bi kech wolf — "I still just catch wolf" Run 3: Fo ol mai rage, a stil bi jos bi kech wulf — same, different spelling

Notice what happened. The trapped wolf became someone catching a wolf. Subject and object swapped. The prisoner became the hunter. The sentence kept all its words and reversed its meaning.

This is one of the chain's favorite tricks.

Stop 5 — Malay: "I" goes missing

Malay receives slightly different Krio sentences across the four runs and responds by eliminating the narrator entirely:

Runs 1 & 4: Demi kemarahanku, hanya ditangkap serigala — "For my anger, only caught a wolf" (by whom? unclear) Run 2: Demi kemarahanku, serigala masih boleh ditangkap — "For my anger, the wolf can still be caught" Run 3: Demi kemarahanku, serigala yang masih boleh ditangkap — "For my anger, the wolf that can still be caught"

Three distinct sentences. No first person. The furious caged narrator has simply stopped existing. What remains is a philosophical question about wolf-catching.

Stops 6–9 — The long drift

Pangasinan, Scots Gaelic, Fulani, and Quechua each faithfully translate what they receive — which means they faithfully transmit everything that's gone wrong so far. By Quechua — a language of the Andes — the word for the creature being caught has drifted far enough from "wolf" that runs 1 and 4 land on something in the insect family (sisikuna — ants in Quechua, rendered back to English as mosquitoes), run 2 stays with wolves (atoqkunataqa), and run 3 drifts all the way to snakes (mach'aqwaytaqa).

Quechua is doing its job. It just inherited a mess.

Stop 10 — The verdict

• Run 1: "To my anger the mosquitoes caught up."
• Run 2: "In my anger, they still managed to catch the wolves."
• Run 3: "Unfortunately for me, it's still possible to catch a snake."
• Run 4: "For my wrath the mosquitoes have taken hold."

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Why the same chain gives four different answers

Here's the part that surprises people: this isn't a glitch. It's by design.

Modern translation models don't pick the answer — they pick an answer, sampling from a range of plausible options. For a clear, unambiguous sentence, the top option wins every time. But "a wolf being caught" versus "someone catching a wolf" is genuinely ambiguous in Krio. When the model hits that ambiguity, it makes a choice. And it doesn't always make the same one.

A different choice at Krio means a different sentence into Malay. A different Malay sentence means different input for Pangasinan. By the time Quechua is involved, the runs are operating on completely different source material, and the animals that come back reflect that.

The chain doesn't just translate. It amplifies. Every small divergence gets bigger with each hop.

But here's the strange part: it doesn't always diverge early.

Look at runs 1 and 4 in the table. They're identical through Fulani — eight consecutive languages, word for word. Then Quechua makes one slightly different grammatical choice, drops a single word, and produces:

Run 1: "To my anger the mosquitoes caught up." Run 4: "For my wrath the mosquitoes have taken hold."

Eight hops of perfect reproducibility. One small difference near the end. A slightly different mosquito.

The mosquito, it turns out, is the stable part. What varies is the grammar it arrives in.

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The one we can't get back

There was a fifth run — same languages — that came back as:

"Unfortunately for me, the mosquitoes got it."

We've run the chain many times since. It hasn't come back. The specific combination of probabilistic choices that produced it — at Krio, at Malay, at Quechua — happened once and scattered.

Unfortunately for us, we couldn't get the mosquitoes back either.

Some translations only exist for a moment. This was one of them.

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What the rat was trying to say

"I am still just a rat in a cage."

Trapped. Raging. Powerless. One of the most universally understood feelings in a single image.

It became mosquitoes.

Not because the chain failed — because it worked. Each language did its honest best with what it received. The problem is that "rat in a cage" as a feeling doesn't have an equivalent vessel in Twi, or Krio, or Quechua. There's no shared idiom to land in. So the chain improvised, hop by hop, until it had built something entirely its own.

Something involving mosquitoes.

Billy Corgan, if you're reading this: we're sorry. Also, try it yourself.

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Your sentence is waiting. The results are unrepeatable.

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