Mistranslations
Literal translation of idioms is a source of numerous translators' jokes and apocrypha. The following famous example has often been told both in the context of newbie translators and that of machine translation: When the sentence "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" (дух бодр, плоть же немощна, an allusion to Mark 14:3 was translated into Russian and then back to English, the result was "The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten" (спирт, конечно, готов, но мясо протухло). |