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How well do you know books? Pretty well? Okay then, how well do you know books when their titles have gone through 20 different languages on Google Translate before being translated back to English? Take this quiz with book titles scrambled by Google Translate to find out!
I’m personally tickled by text that’s been Google Translate scrambled. It’s a testament to how complex and nuanced language is, how valuable real human translators are, and sometimes how beauty can be found in the miscommunication.
For this quiz, I used a Google extension called Bad Translator that automatically ran the book titles I chose through 20 random languages before translating them back into English. The results varied in how closely they stuck to the original titles. Some made me laugh. Some of them sound like they could really be bestsellers.
Here’s an example of what happens when I run the first line of Pride and Prejudice through the Google Translate scrambler. The original line is: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
Bad Translator tells me: “Everyone knows that a man is happy without a woman.”
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Wow. That’s kind of the opposite of what Jane Austen was trying to say. Anyway, let’s get to the quizzing!
Google Translate Scrambled Book Title Answers
WARNING: Spoilers lie ahead! Stop scrolling if you don’t want to see the correct answers to the quiz.