Lost in translation

 I decided to try an experiment just now. I wanted to figure out how far from the original meaning you get when you translate something first into Hebrew, then into Greek, then into Latin, and then back into English.

But I don't know any of those languages, so I had Google Translate do it for me.

Here is the result when you run the lyrics of "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin through that process:

Q Mrs. for sure

The only thing that shines is gold

He bought a ladder to paradise

When he comes there he knows

If all stores are closed

the verb has something to come

Oh oh oh oh and he bought a ladder to paradise

There is a sign on the wall

But he wants to be safe

Because you know that sometimes two words mean

In the tree next to the creek

It's a songbird

Sometimes all our thoughts are confusing

Oh that makes me wonder

Oh that makes me wonder

feeling is i feel

When I look west

And my spirit cries to leave

I saw in my heart

smoke flowing through the trees

And the voices of those standing and watching

Oh that makes me wonder

Oh that really makes me wonder

And soon they whisper, if we all ask for a song

Then the filter will guide us to logic

And new days emerge

For those who stand for a long time

Smile and resound in the woods

If there is a disturbance in the fence

Don't confuse now

It's just spring cleaning for Queen May

There are two ways you can walk on the road

But in the long run

It's still time to change the way you are

And it makes me wonder

Your head is muttering and not going

If you don't know

Colum invites you to participate

Dear lady, did you hear the wind blowing?

And how'd you

Is your voice leaning above the whispering breeze?

And while you maneuver

our shadows are higher than our soul

A lady we all know to walk

Who lights a white light and wants to show it?

As everything still turns gold

And if you hear much

The melody ends for you

Since everyone is one and the same all

Rock and roll

He bought a ladder to paradise

... So, you can sort of get a lot of the concepts, but lots of the words end up as synonyms, and some don't translate at all.

And we only know where it does and doesn't follow the original because we actually have the original, written in our language, in our lifetime. 

Now... imagine that someone who knew the members of Zeppelin well and spent a lot of time with them - say, the band's agent - had been at a Zeppelin concert in the 70s. That one concert was the ONLY time the song was ever played. No recordings exist, and the lyrics were never written down. Imagine that all the original members of Zeppelin died at the same time as Bonzo, and most of the people who attended the concert were just random people who didn't know Paige and Plant, so the most reliable source for recalling the lyrics is the agent.

Someone whose first language is Mandarin hears about this legendary concert with this amazing song and wants to know the words to that song. She interviews the agent today, in the 2020s, and asks him to recall the lyrics to Stairway from memory. She writes the result down by hand, IN MANDARIN. Then she passes it on to somebody else, who passes it on to somebody else, for centuries, copying these lyrics by hand as best they can. 

Eventually someone in the year 2300, whose first language is Russian, decides to translate those copies of copies of copies from Mandarin into Russian (as spoken centuries from now, so both Mandarin and Russian will be as different from today's as our English is from Shakespeare's) - again, by hand. 

And then THOSE copies of copies are handed down over the centuries until the year 3500. Russian is now a dead language, only studied by scholars, while Mandarin is unrecognizably different from the "original", and English is still spoken in a fairly similar form to today's but nobody knows anymore how a number of words were pronounced in the 20th century - and in any case the lyrics were never written down in English. Someone in the year 3500 decides to translate the Russian copies into Gromlian, a language that didn't exist until the year 2800, and has radically different rules of grammar from any of the previous languages, which also have radically different rules from each other. 

And now, they try to sing the song.

How different are those lyrics going to be now? Is there any chance at ALL that they will convey the original ideas? And with everyone who had ever heard the original long decayed into dust, how would anyone know?

Even if someone finds one of the "original" Russian copies? Or even one of the Mandarin copies from around 2300? The original was never written down by the author, or even in the author's native language, so even if people who speak 35th Century Gromlian have been studying 20th Century Mandarin since the year 3000, for the purpose of translating these specific lyrics... how close are they gonna get, really?

That process is exactly how you got the words of Jesus as translated in the King James Bible, folks.