From Google Translate to Babylon: navigating the minefield that is free translation when learning a language (and how to avoid embarrassing mistakes). The Force is Strong…   There is an internet rumour/urban legend that goes like this: in Star Wars, Yoda’s unique style of speech was created by first translating his dialogue into Hungarian and then translating it directly back into English, word for word. Hungarian has a very different word order to English and makes use of suffixes rather than prepositions, resulting in ‘Yoda-tongue’ when back-translated. Whether there is any truth to this is unclear, but what is likely…

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