Thursday 26 April 2007

Terrific power!


Storage-case!, originally uploaded by Jonas Wiklund.

When I saw this stuff bag at the 100 Yen store I couldn't help buying it, of course. The sentence "You are freer than whether to use with what kind of use" is obviously a result of machine translation. As far as I know the English sentence is grammatical, if not syntactical. The question is: what was the original Japanese sentence that produced this seemingly unintelligible drivel?


My office mate suggested:

どんな使い方使うのか、あなたの自由です
[Donna tsukaikata tuskau no ka, anata no jiyuu desu.]

which google language tools translates to "Whether how what kind of to use you use, you it is free", but a sligthly better translator may interpretate as "You are free to use it in any way". Clearly google's software cannot parse the sentence well enough to figure out which question word the particle "ka" after nominalizing "no" modifies.

That only leaves the question how to modify the Japanese sentence above to include the comparative form of free in a natural way.

Beats me.

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