Bad Translator

What it is

Bad translator is a guessing game about machine translation gone wrong. A familiar English phrase has been passed through a chain of languages and back again, and what comes out is a mangled cousin of the original. You see the mangled version and pick the real phrase from four options. Daily mode gives you five rounds with a mix from slightly off to completely lost in translation, and practice mode keeps dealing phrases until you miss.

How to play

Choose daily or practice and press start. Read the broken sentence, ideally out loud, and decide which of the four originals it came from, because the rhythm often survives when the words do not. After you answer, the game shows the chain of languages the phrase traveled through, so you can see where the damage happened. Daily mode scores you out of five. Practice is endless, random, and stops at your first miss.

What makes it different

The comedy is machine-made, not written: the phrases are pre-generated translation chains, and the results have the specific wrongness that only a machine produces, the grammar bent and the meaning gone. Seeing the language chain afterward is the best part, because you start to learn which hops do the most harm. Common sayings and film quotes turn up a lot, which makes the good guesses feel earned.

Why it is on Bored

We built it because everyone has laughed at a bad translation and it deserved to be a game. It lives in Trivia quiz as the one that tests your ear for idiom rather than your memory for facts.

Tips

• Read the mangled text aloud, broken grammar often hides a familiar saying
• Look at the language chain after each answer and learn the pattern
• Daily first, then practice to sharpen up
• Film quotes and proverbs come up often, keep them in mind

FAQ