More Fun With Babelfish

Yellojkt looking for a sidewalk cafe.

As at least some of my readers know, I spend way too much time in the comment section (or Boodle, as the commenters like to call it) of a blog written by Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post. Joel recently went on a long working vacation with his family in France and the first of his humor columns, titled "The Art of Doing Nothing", about the experience was published. It humorously admires the ability of the French to completely relax at the omnipresent sidewalk cafes.

Back when I visited France a few years ago, I loved bistros and the little restauraunts where a single person was chef, maitre d’, waiter, and bottle washer. They have charm that no franchise of Le Madeline will ever capture. I knew just enough French to be able to tell "boeuf" from "poulet" on the very helpful menu boards on the outsides of all Parisian restaurants (a practice I wish us Yanks would emulate more often), but I still had great meal after great meal. I envy the café lifestyle Joel gently mocks.

Anyhoo, us Boodlers are a pretty tight knit bunch, and when a lot of new commenters come out of the woodwork, we get mildly suspicious. The phenomenon is known as a RoveStorm from when Joel was critical of Karl Rove and all sorts of chaos ensued. In a fit of political incorrectness that only an Ugly American like myself can muster, I called the influx of Gallic comments a FrogStorm. I apologigize for the anuran slur. It turns out that Joel’s column had caught the attention of Yahoo France. They had a front page synopsis of the column which made many French speakers seek out the source. Hence, the many new voices on the comments. Some took umbrage, but others got the humor.

The Yahoo column was in French, of course, so I ran it through Babelfish trying to get the gist of it. I have written before about what a complete hash Babelfish makes of anything remotely idiomatic and this was no exception. To make sure that Babelfish is just as incompetent in French as it is in German, I took the quotes from the French article and translated them back into English to see if it would even come close to Joel’s original bon mots.

Joel Achenbach column	Yahoo France summary	Babelfish back into English
Sitting in a cafe is one of the main activities in Paris.	S'assoir dans un café est une des principales activités à Paris.	to assoir itself in a coffee is one of the principal activities in Paris.
It's what Parisians do instead of working or jogging.	S'assoir dans un café (...) c'est ce que font les Parisiens au lieu de travailler ou de faire du jogging.	it is what the Parisian ones instead of working do or to make jogging.
…a Frenchman in a pose so relaxed he might have been modeling for Toulouse-Lautrec. He was doing nothing, and doing it with panache.	un Français assis dans une pose si détendue qu'il aurait pu être un modèle pour Toulouse-Lautrec. Il ne faisait rien et le faisait avec panache.	a French sitting in an installation if slackened that it could have been a model for Toulouse-Lautrec. It did not do anything and did it with plume.
Or perhaps he was just enjoying the Latin Quarter, a section so old that I am pretty sure its residents still speak in Latin.	A moins qu'il ne profite tout simplement du Quartier latin, un quartier si vieux que, je suis sûr, les habitants parlent le latin.	A less than it does not benefit quite simply from the Latin Quarter, a district so old that, I am sure, the inhabitants speak Latin.

I am assuming that the person that wrote the Yahoo article did a good job translating Joel into French. Humor is notoriously tone dependent. Let me know if you do know any French and can vouch for the quality of the Yahoo article. As you can tell, even when real French speakers do the first round of translation, a roundtrip through Babelfish is guaranteed to lose all nuance and most meaning from whatever sentence you started with. Someday this stuff will actually work, but that day is not now.