改变世界的误译:改变世界

　　行有行规，门有门道，不同的语言亦有各自独特的规则和风貌。正因为如此，译者要想在两种语言之间准确精到、游刃有余地转换，真是难之又难。这不，本文就列举了一些翻译过程中产生的误译，有的令人啼笑皆非，有的让人匪夷所思，有的叫人心惊肉跳。误译看似语言上的小毛病，严重起来却足以改变世界。
　　In a rapidly shrinking world, it’s becoming more and more important to have translations that are both lightning-fast and actually understandable. To underline how hard this is, here’s that sentence translated from English to Thai to Russian to Japanese and back to English, courtesy of1) Google Translate: Become increasingly important in order to convert the world to fall faster, as well as lightning, to understand the actual.
　　And as much as that sucked, it’s nothing compared to these doozies.
　　A Missed “I” Gives Us Martians
　　Back in 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli reported a rather shocking discovery: There were “canali,” or canals, on Mars. Since canals are artificial by definition, this caused a shitstorm of speculation about the possibility of a long-vanished race of Martians who must have made the structures to irrigate their crops.
　　But it wasn’t Schiaparelli who really got Martian fever going. Astronomer Percival Lowell read Schiaparelli’s work and his Mars boner got so hard that he moved to Arizona, constructed his own observatory and spent years publishing papers speculating that A) Mars was once populated by a civilized race of brilliant engineers, and B) those engineers created these canals as a last-ditch2) effort to save a dying planet.
　　There were only two problems: First off, Lowell was basically just drawing canals at random, apparently, as no one has been able to correlate any of his lines with actual stuff on Mars. Second, and more importantly, “canali” doesn’t mean “canals,” it actually means “channels” or “trenches,” and Schiaparelli was just noting some totally natural terrain differences.
　　By all accounts, Schiaparelli was understandably pissed3) at the way everyone kept connecting his observations with Lowell’s hogwash4), but by the time the truth actually got out, it was too late. Lowell’s wild imagination spurred the science fiction fantasies of everyone from H. G. Wells5), whose The War of the Worlds also featured the last-ditch efforts of a dying Martian race, to Edgar Rice Burroughs6), whose novel A Princess of Mars is also about—guess what? A dying civilization on the planet Mars.
　　By the time the 20th century got going, Martians on Mars were a done deal, and it was all because of one itty-bitty7) “i.”
　　Nikita Khrushchev Wants to Respectfully Mourn You尼基