Say What?

In an effort to stay on top of things in this class, I explored Part IV of module 2 - Assistive Technologies. I thought it would be fun to take some of our English tongue twisters and translate them to French, then back to English. The results are listed below.
(Original) Sally sold seashells by the seashore.
(English to French) Sally a vendun des seashells par le bord de la mer.
(French back to English) Sally sold seashells by the edge of the sea.

(Original) How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuch wood?
(English to French) Combien de bois une marmotte d'Ameriquie pourrait-elle jeter si une
marmot d'could pourrait jeter le bois?
(French back to English) How much wood a marmot d'America could it throw if a marmot
d'Could America throw wood?

(Original) Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. A peck of pickled peppers Peter
Piper picked. If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, how many pickled
peppers did Peter Piper pick?
(English to French) Le joueur de pipeau de Peter a selectionne un picotin de poivrons
marines. Un picotin de joueur de pipeau marine de Peter de poivrons a
selectionne. Si le joueur de pipeau de Peter selectionnait un picotn de poivrons
marines, que des poivrons le joueur de pipeau de Peter a-t-il marine a-t-il
selctionne?
(French back to English) The player of pipeau of Peter selected a ration of oats of marinated
sweet peoppers. A ration of oats of player of pipeau marinated of sweet pepper
Peter selected. If the player of pipeau of Peter selected a ration of oats of
marinated sweet peppers, that sweet peppers the player of pipeau of Peter did
marinate it selected?

In the first one, the only slight change was for the term seashore. In the French version, the alliteration was lost. For the woodchuck, I have learned the French call it a marmot and I was impressed that the idiom "chuck" was translated correctly. It's been my experience that idioms are hard to perceive in foreign languages. Again, the alliteration was not apparent. Lastly, good old Peter Piper. I found this one quite amusing. This one DID provide some alliteration although I don't know that it would be classified as a french tongue twister. In the re-translation to English, I giggled at Piper being referred to as one who plays a pipe and not as a last name. I'm guessing that "oats" was the re-translation of "peck" and can see where "marinated sweet" is a reasonable re-translation for "pickled". All in all, a fun experiment.

I've added the babelfish yahoo translator to my gadgets. Hope you take the opportunity to play with it. Enjoy!

P.S. I saved the translations on a word document, but could not copy and paste them to this blog. Please forgive the lack of accents that were not tranferrable to this post.