Thinking about a recent comment, I tried the following experiment. I copied the second and third paragraphs from the Headmaster’s introduction on the Summer Fields website. I pasted this text into an online translation website. Firstly I translated the paragraphs into French, then that translation into German and finally back into English. At each translation, some of the meaning gets lost producing a ‘Chinese whispers’ effect. The text gets altered with quite charming results!
Always a strong school tradition held the summer fields. In the course of the five last years more than 40 scholarships and rewards in the important state schools won are. The talented personnel has enormous forces, which are infinite in the internal and outward obviousness of the class hall. The whole amounts to 70 mornings of reasons, and the playgrounds, the equipments are unusual. The sport, the music, the art, the conception and the technology, the drama and the services from TCI are from first order.
The summer creates remainders, which were committed at the Christian values, on which it was based, and we are very proud from the quality of the pastoral care, which was congratulated strongly in the newest inspection to ISI. We aim off to consolidate and develop an environment, the confidence in each child multiplied. More importantly the boys are happy, and a strong sense of family exists in the whole school. Summerfieldians leave us as the enthusiastic and full boys with interests and qualifications, them with them will continuously take the whole life.
Well you can’t say fairer than that! I particularly like the bit about the ‘talented personnel’ with ‘enormous forces, which are infinite’ – you have been warned! I was also pleased by the one sentence left largely unaltered.
This seemingly random mutation during translation is not unlike the process that occurs when organisms reproduce. Mutations that occur in living things tend to be minor – anything on the scale of the example above would instantly kill any offspring – but it is small random variations that allows natural selection to drive the process of evolution.
Comments