‘Fresh Prince’ theme song after it’s been Google translated 64 times
If you’re a ‘90s kid, then you probably know all the words to the “Fresh Prince” theme song. But do you know what the lyrics would be if you translated them into Mandarin and back to English?
Worse, what if you translated the lyrics into Mandarin, took those lyrics and translated them to Spanish and then repeated the process for all 64 languages on Google Translate? Well, besides wasting a bunch of time, you get some pretty funny results.
That’s what CDZA, a group that creates musical video experiments, did this week in a YouTube video that has begun to go viral.
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The results included respectable translations and completely inaccurate bits of hilarity. It’s like that elementary school game Telephone, where kids whisper a message from one to the next and by the time the last person says it out loud it’s totally different.
First, CDZA translated the lyrics to Mandarin and back to English. That changed “Chillin’ out, maxin’, relaxin’ all cool” to “Cold, apricot, relaxing all cool.”
Next, the group took the lyrics through Mandarin, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese and back to English. Among the highlights from that run were “You’re moving with your auntie and uncle in Bel-Air” translated into “Your aunt knows your uncle in Bel-Air.”
The song was then put through Bengali, Russian, Japanese and German. That somehow translated to “I yelled to the cabby, ‘Yo, homes smell ya’ later’” into “I said, ‘I kissed a driver at the end of the room.’”
Finally, to top it all off, CDZA put the theme song through 63 of Google Translate’s languages before bringing it back to English. I wish I could point out some of the highlights, but at that point, the song is basically unrecognizable.
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