6/21/2007

Online translators =bad, fun video projects = good

Filed under: — Aprille @ 2:45 pm

Do any of you smart readers speak Portuguese (peninsular, ideally, but I’d take Brazilian too)?

When DC and I were in Portugal, we had these really amazing pastries called travesseiros, and I’d like to try to make them sometime.  I found a recipe, but it’s in Portuguese, which I don’t read nearly well enough to try to bake from.  This is what babelfish told me it translated to:

Ingredients: 500 grams of folhada mass caretaker 1 chávena of soft egg tea with almond Confection: It extends the mass folhada until reaching the thickness of 4mm, polvilhando slightly with flour that always necessary not to catch nor to the coil nor to the table. Later cut with a knife rectângulos of mass with about 12x 12 cm It places in the center 1 Soft Egg dessert spoon, spreading a little in the direction of the width without arriving at edges. It rolls com.cuidado and espalme them in way slightly that the latch of the mass is capsized for one the sides never for low. It places the pillows in a tray separate ones of the others and has slightly led to cook in sufficiently hot oven about 15 minutes. When they will be cooked, removes them and polvilhe them still hot with sugar one by one.

What?  “espalme them in way slightly that the latch of the mass is capsized for one the sides never for low”?

Online translators are so weird.  They’re kind of funny sometimes, though.  This is what happened when I translated the wedding vows DC and I used from English to German to French to Greek back to English:

by our family and friends, and with his love and the support, the I, Aprille, you are decided, Denny, in order to you are my spouse. With the faith in in your love and in the admiration of your tender heart, from all that the life can to us take, I promise my himself in you. To you I keep, I laugh with you and cry with you. Is friendly in you in in the thought, in the word and means the letter. I am together your affectionate partner in in our life, and I am your gentleman, as you practise your clean dreams. This day, front, me’hrj a death us you make, zusammenstehen. This is my promise in you. I am proud in order to I am your woman.

Supersweet!  At some point along the way it said I was Denny’s Master, which was pretty cool, but that disappeared between French and Greek.  I think Master got turned into gentleman, in the “I am your gentleman” part.  Har.

Oh, that secret thing I said I’d write about today?  It was cool.  As a fun thing for our annual all-staff meeting, some colleagues and I made a Daily Show-style interview with our biggest boss of all, the CIO.  I don’t have a web version yet, and I’m not even sure I’ll be allowed to share it, but it was all pretty funny.  We did a first take where our interviewer asked Steve (the CIO) a variety of questions, then we rewrote it to exploit things he said out of context.  In the final version, Steve has vowed to eliminate Spam (the meat product, not the email) from the university, his children are laptop computers, and he calls the Help Desk when he’s having emotional problems.
Steve was a really good sport about it, and he even did a rather funny introduction telling people to pay attention, because the video contained things he’d meant to say in the past but hadn’t gotten a chance to.

I’m sad the project was over.  It was a fun way to use work time.

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