Sunday, January 9, 2011

Translating part 2

I'm going to continue working backwards with this translation project, so now that I've finished translating the last sentence, I'll translate the second last sentence.

生活在神秘美丽的马勒戈壁朝尼族自治区。
Google Translate says that this means "the mysterious beauty of living in Nepal of Mahler's ethnic autonomous regions towards the Gobi."

(?!)

Anyway...

I know all of the words in the first half of the sentence from either knowing them before or by translating them yesterday.

生活神秘美丽的...
Lives in mysterious, beautiful...

Google Translate is good at translating individual words... most of the time. I was mucking around with the last few characters and no matter what I did I came up with random countries, including North Korea, Nigeria (尼日利亚) and Nepal (尼泊尔)and according to Wikipedia and the National Geographic website, llamas come from South America.

Apparently 戈壁 (Gēbì) is the Chinese name for the Gobi desert, which apparently is located sort of on the border between China and Mongolia. It's Asia's largest desert and the world's fifth largest. The things you learn trying to translate fake Chinese Yu-Gi-Oh cards!

If all of these Asian areas come up, then perhaps llamas have been introduced to Asia, so I'm going to have to go back to the drawing board here.

According to this person llamas can also be found in Asia (I'm assuming more likely to be Nepal than North Korea though, because Nepal is more mountainous and some other site said that llamas are found in "elevated regions in South America"). Wiki Answers probably isn't the best place for information, but it's good for now.

Just for kicks, I shoved the second half of the sentence through Google Translate again and it says "Nepal ethnic autonomous regions towards the Gobi Mahler." At first I wondered why it didn't say Ma Qin- every time I'd searched up 马勤 all I got was "Ma Qin." Then I realised that I'd got the character wrong due to the iPod's fuzziness and it's actually 马勒 (mǎlēi). This is the part that shoved "Mahler" into the translation.

But why Mahler? Mahler's a composer! I Googled "mahler" to make sure that there isn't a place or anything with the same name, but it seems that Mahler's just a composer. Another translation Google gave for 马勒 was "muller" which according to Google is also just a name.

I am very confused. So I'm going to take a break.

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