Reply To: Babelfish Wants To Eat Your Brains (Or Puff Out You The Brain)

[Angelastic]

Mainly the SMSing consists of changing qu’ to k’. I changed it to qu’ in just a few places where I thought it would help babelfish.

I’m considering writing a few more versions of the lyrics, getting progressively closer to formal, grammatically correct, understandable-by-people-who-learnt-French-from-a-grammar-book-or-an-anglophone-in-a-classroom French, and further from anything that would fit into the tune. And then a Gallic lipogram just for compltnss.

For now, I would just like to point out something particularly cool about the French version, which people who don’t know any French would not notice (and indeed, I didn’t know this idiom until I heard the song):

I mean, no one’s gonna eat your eyes -> Ça va pas t’coûter les yeux d’la tête (literally, ”it won’t cost you the eyes from your head”, figuratively, an idiom close to,”ït won’t cost you an arm and a leg“.)

This line makes it look like the French was the original and the English version was a translation which missed the pun. I would not be surprised if the person who wrote the translation first saw the possibility of this line, and then was compelled to write the rest of the song around it.