Saturday, May 16, 2009

Spanish to English to Spanish ~AKA~ Fun with Google Translate

Ok, so there's this song I really like. It's called Para Donde Vas by The Iguanas. (I like the version on the Phenomenon Motion Picture Soudtrack, it's got a little bit more pep than the version I've linked to above.)

Anyhow, the song is in Spanish. So I found the lyrics on a webpage: 

Para donde vas?
Para donde vas, muchacha!
Dime, para donde vas, donde vas?
Si vas al baile, baila conmigo
Si vas al carnaval quiero ir contigo
Si vas a donde quiera
No me quedo atras
Porque quiero amarte
Mas y mas

So, after running it through Google Translate, these are the English lyrics I got:
 
Where to go? 
For where you go, girl? 
Tell me where to go, where you going? 
If you go to dance, dance with me. 
If you want to go to the carnival, I want to go.
If you go anywhere 
I do not fall behind.
Because I love you
More and more

So just for fun, I dropped those English lyrics (exact translation from Google) into the translator, and got back a completely different set of Spanish lyrics than the ones I started with. Huh. So me being me, and apparently having nothing better to do with my time, I played with it until I got the the English lyrics to translate (almost) exactly into the original Spanish lyrics: 

For where are you going? 
For where are you going, girl? 
Tell me, where are you going?  
If going to dance, dance with me. 
If going to carnival, I want to go with you. 
If going wherever you want 
Don't me stay back.
Because I want loving you, 
more and more

The creative problem solving of this was fun for me, because the original Spanish to English translation changes depending on what punctuation is added. The first three lines changed when I added the question marks, and the ad libs (muchacha, dime) that are sung between the first few lines in the second chorus. The line "No me quedo atras" remained untranslatable until I moved it up as part of the previous line, and then it became "I do not fall behind". And some of the other lines translated more clearly when I added commas into the sentence structure. And then getting it back into Spanish again, finding the right conjugation of each word to make the translation read the way the original lyrics did, and sometimes the right combination of words.

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