English Translation
Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.
The old jokes are the best, but don’t really work in direct translation!
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IKR… I have some pointed questions to ask whoever originally decided this was a great sentence to include in a translation database😒
Fascinatingly, the pared-down sentence “Fruit flies like bananas” is in the Tagalog-from-English random collection—so somebody must have gotten ahold of that sentence and chopped off the English-only wordplay, somewhere along the line.
Seeing these kinds of untranslatable puns takes me back to reading The Odyssey in high school, where our English translation had Odysseus tricking the Cyclops into calling him “Nohbdy” (later mistaken for “nobody” by the other cyclopes). I mean… Nohbdy😅… that’s some weak-ass sauce, but now that I’m legitimately multilingual, at least I can respect the abject hopelessness of trying to translate wordplay of just about any kind whatsoever. (I’m forever left to wonder whether that little parlor trick had more layers in the original Greek, forcing the translator to choose which one(s) to throw away entirely—in the same way we only get to keep one of la frutta vola or moscerini [della frutta] here.)
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On Tatoeba, several contributors in French, Spanish and German translated this with mythical beasts called the Time Flies ( Les Mouches du Temp / Las Moscas del Tiempo / Zeitfliegen).
I imagine Time Flies to be Dr. Who type creatures, and in this instance they are all great admirers of a very special arrow -
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That single image captures a lot of the essence of AI art, too. It even has the mutually contradictory shadows AND the randomly misspelled words (“polce” box)!
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The import from Tatoeba was an automated process, and in huge upload it’s nearly impossible to exclude the bad apples without a human going through each and every sentence. I doubt that even an AI would’ve flagged this as a dubious sentence.
That said, I wish the folks on Tatoeba had refrained from this kind of creativity.
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yeah. “whoever originally decided” = tatoeba user.
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