Language. Chaos. Occasional insight.
This is the Translation Mixer blog — field notes from running a translation telephone game in production. We break down real translation chains hop by hop to find exactly where meaning fell apart, stress-test the “hardest” languages with repeatable experiments, and write up what seventy years of machine translation history looks like when you poke it with a stick. Every mangled sentence you’ll read here is real output from the mixer — nothing is invented, which is somehow what makes it funnier.
New posts land a few times a month. Start with a featured remix if you want the comedy, or the linguistics posts if you want to know why the comedy works.
Words That Survive Translation Perfectly (and the Science of Why)
"OK" is called the most universal word on earth. It lasted five hops and came back as "show." We ran 78 words through five languages, then put the 46 survivors through ten more. Borrowed words beat basic vocabulary, and tea came home as a car.
How to Say Gray in 52 Languages (and Why Half of Them Disagree About Colors)
Gray is the color of ash in at least eight unrelated language families. We collected the word in 52 languages, tested where blue ends and green begins, and watched a gray cat turn green at one identifiable hop.
We Typed "idk tbh, hbu?" Into a Translator and It Came Back West Frisian
Google Translate knows what idk and imho mean. It just doesn't always know they're English. We ran 49 abbreviations through the mixer: 15 were detected as other languages, lol came back from Arabic as "Very funny," and one real word fixes almost all of it.
Thunder Mug to Rizz: We Ran a Century of Slang Through a Translator
Old slang was supposed to survive and new slang was supposed to break. Both held up about equally. What actually decides it is whether the slang is one word or a metaphor, plus what a single hop does to y'all and ain't.
Finnish and Hungarian Don't Break Translators. Everyone Assumes They Do.
Finnish has fifteen grammatical cases and finished 19th of 20 for translation damage. We tested the longest words in Finnish, Hungarian, and Turkish to find out why difficulty for learners is not difficulty for machines.
Why Machine Translation Still Struggles With Japanese
Japanese did more damage than any of the other 19 languages we tested. A guided autopsy: invented pronouns, deleted counters, and the most common polite phrase in the language failing to survive a round trip.
We Round-Tripped One Paragraph Through 20 Languages. Here's the Damage Ranking.
One paragraph, 20 languages, one round trip each, scored for damage. Japanese won, Finnish placed 19th, and re-running the whole test on a second engine changed the ranking, which turned out to be the most useful result.
Famous Mistranslations in History, Recreated
Mokusatsu, 'We will bury you,' the $71M word, Moses' horns — we reran history's most famous translation disasters through modern machine translation. Five of eight still fail.
All Your Base Are Belong to Us: Gaming's Greatest Mistranslation, Rerun in 2026
What was Zero Wing's script actually trying to say? We ran the original Japanese through modern machine translation (a perfect sweep), sorted gaming's Engrish pantheon by honesty, and fed the meme itself back into the mixer. It came back as gardening.
How to Play the Google Translate Telephone Game (With or Without Friends)
Rules for the Google Translate telephone game three ways: the classic solo copy-paste method, the party version with scoring and a printable kit, and the one-click version.
Translation Telephone: 25 Sentences That Fell Apart Spectacularly
25 real translation telephone chains and their wreckage: proverbs inverted, movie quotes deflated, and the time 'I'll be back' came home as a clergyman named Father Goshen.
Google Translate API Rate Limits Explained (and the "User Rate Limit Exceeded" Error)
What the userRateLimitExceeded and 429 errors mean, Google's character-based quota tiers, backoff code that actually works — and the $6 overnight bill that taught us to count characters, not requests.
The Translation Telephone Game: How a Schoolyard Classic Grew Up
The telephone game is called something different in every country — Stille Post, téléphone arabe, kulaktan kulağa. Here's how the schoolyard classic grew up into Translation Mixer.
How a Rat Became Mosquitoes: Tracing a Translation Chain Gone Wrong
A Smashing Pumpkins lyric sent through ten languages — Twi, Hunsrik, Krio, Quechua, and more — came back as mosquitoes. We ran it four times. Here's exactly where the rat disappeared.
Loanwords: 30 Words English Stole From Other Languages
From schadenfreude to shampoo, 30 words English borrowed and never gave back — plus what happens when you stuff them all in one sentence and run it through a five-language translation chain.
Life in Your Years: Commas Save Lives. They Also Save Quotes.
One missing period turned a Lincoln quote into a contradiction. How punctuation (or the lack of it) breaks translation chains in unexpected ways.
Shakespeare: True or False?
'To be or not to be, that is the question' — sent through 5 languages — came back as 'True or false, what's the problem?' Here's why.
What's the Hardest Language to Translate? (We Tested Them All)
We round-tripped the same sentence through Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Finnish, and Hungarian — three times each — and ranked the damage. The winner isn't the language you'd guess.
The Duck Song in 5 Languages — Google Translate Telephone Edition
We ran Bryant Oden's Duck Song through Acehnese, Dutch, Acholi, Belarusian, and Arabic — the full lyrics, verse by verse. The duck still wants grapes. Mostly.
How Translation Mixer Was Born: A Pandemic Story
How Translation Mixer started: a pandemic, two laughing kids, and a chain of Google Translate tabs that produced something inexplicably funny.
The History of Machine Translation: From Cold War Spies to Neural Networks
The history of machine translation in one wild arc: a staged 1954 Cold War demo, the funding winter that followed, the statistical comeback, and the 2016 neural leap — with a timeline of all eight turning points.
Why Machine Translation Humor Works
Why do translations get funny? The real linguistics behind it: incongruity theory, compounding drift, and why the machine's mistakes are funnier because they aren't mistakes at all.