How Translation Mixer Was Born: A Pandemic Story

It was 2020. My wife and I were both working from home, the days had stopped having names, and one evening I heard a sound from the next room that I hadn't heard in a while: my two teenagers laughing. Not polite laughing. The kind where somebody can't breathe and somebody else keeps making it worse.

It went on for hours. I had to know.

Google Translate Fails

When I finally escaped my last video call of the day, they showed me a YouTube channel then called Google Translate Fails, now Twisted Translations. The idea is simple and kind of genius. Take a song everybody knows, run the lyrics through Google Translate into French, then Japanese, then Swahili, then back to English, and sing whatever comes out. With a straight face. To the original tune.

I was hooked immediately.

Naturally the kids wanted to make their own. They grabbed songs they liked, pushed them through Google Translate a few times, and then sat at the kitchen table trying to sing the results. Some were hilarious. Some were just weird. A few were accidentally beautiful, which was somehow funnier.

The only part that wasn't fun was the process. Paste the lyrics, pick a language, copy the result, paste it back in, pick another language, copy, paste, and somewhere around the fourth round somebody asks "wait, did we already do Swahili?" and you start over. One song could take fifteen minutes.

I'm an IT guy, so my brain immediately said: I could script this.

Reader, I did not script this

Not for years, anyway. The pandemic ended, the kids grew up, and the idea sat in the "someday" pile with everything else that lives there.

When I finally did build it, it turned out to be more than a script. There are two translation engines behind it (Google and Microsoft's Azure) and they disagree with each other constantly, which is great for comedy and terrible for my sanity. Every hop costs a little money, which is why there are usage limits. But the thing the kids did by hand now takes a few seconds: type something in, pick your languages or let the chaos slider pick them for you, and watch what happens at every stop along the way.

So of course I had to test it the way they would have.

Row, row, row your... what?

I needed a song everybody knows and nobody owns, so I went with the nursery rhyme:

Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

I sent it through three different chains on September 18, 2026. Everything below is exactly what came out.

Round 1: French → Japanese → Swahili → Finnish

Row in the boat, row, row carefully in the boat on the river. Full of joy, full of joy, life is just a dream.

Honestly, not bad. The boat got mentioned twice, "gently" turned into "carefully" like somebody's mom was watching, and two of the merrilys went missing. You can still sing it if you cram the first line.

Round 2: Korean → Yoruba → Georgian → Icelandic → Lao

Singing, continuously, slowly, slowly down the river. Happiness, happiness, happiness, life is just a dream.

The boat is gone. Nobody is rowing. Somebody is just drifting down a river, singing, forever.

Here's how that happened. Korean was fine. Yoruba left a few words in English and somehow added a "Roar" at the front. Georgian then saw "row" and decided it meant a row, like a row of chairs, and translated it as "consecutiveness." Icelandic turned "Roar" into a scream. Lao turned the scream into singing. And the boat? It fell overboard back in Yoruba and nobody went back for it.

Round 3: German → Haitian Creole → Mongolian → Amharic → Welsh

A row, a row, a run, the river down. Happiness, happiness, happiness, life is just a dream.

The ending is just a sad, shorter version of the song. But the trip there was the best part of the whole day.

German got it perfect. Then Haitian Creole translated "gently down the stream" as dousman desann larivyè Lefrat la, which means "gently down the Euphrates."

The Euphrates. As in the river in ancient Mesopotamia. Nobody asked Haitian Creole to relocate a nursery rhyme to the cradle of civilization, but it did, and for exactly one stop our little boat was floating past Babylon. Then Mongolian translated it as just "the river" and the whole detour vanished. You'd never know it happened from the final result, which is why the mixer shows every step. Some of the best stuff never makes it home.

The scorecard

Every round lost at least one "merrily." The song has four of them and never came back with more than three, so somewhere out there is a small pile of lost merrilys.

"Life is but a dream," on the other hand, survived every single round. Apparently every language agrees on that one.

As for singing: Round 1 fits the tune if you cheat. Round 3 fits if you commit. Round 2 is a spoken word piece.

Your turn

That's really the whole story. Two teenagers found something funny in 2020, I spent a few years not building it, and now it exists so you don't have to copy and paste your way through ten tabs.

If you want to see the Euphrates for yourself, here's that exact chain, ready to go. Fair warning: the engines change their minds from day to day, so your boat might end up somewhere completely different. Or swap in your own favorite song and try singing the result. That's how the kids played it, and if you're playing with friends, our telephone game rules say the loser has to sing.

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Translation Mixer is a passion project inspired by Twisted Translations on YouTube. Not affiliated with Google, Microsoft, or Twisted Translations.