Fun Friday: Translating some Fresh Prince

If you don't know the lyrics to the theme song for The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, you're dead to me.

No, not really. But I can't remember not knowing that rap, and I remember the first time I heard the full version from the early episodes - it was late at night during my second semester of graduate school and I called in my roommate to check it out. If you somehow don't know the song (or just don't know the full version), here you go:

Now, a small tangent. When I was a freshman in college, I took one semester of Spanish because I thought at the time that I'd minor in the language. During those sixteen weeks, I learned about the wonders of internet translation. Google wasn't around yet, and the translation sites out there tended not to support a ton of languages. Still, every once in a while I'd go to translate a phrase and click the wrong button, so it would go from Spanish to Italian instead of Spanish to English. Well, in working on longer projects, one time I translated a paragraph from English to Spanish and then thought I had copied something different from my clipboard to translate from Spanish to English. Instead, it translated that same paragraph back to English, and I noticed that it was a little different. I have no idea what the nuances were (it's been 10+ years, people), but it was a neat "trick." Every once in a while I'd giggle at how something translated from English to Spanish to English again, and sometimes I'd try to figure out what happened. Other times, life went on.

Well, here's the intersection between these two anecdotes. Someone has posted a video on YouTube of what happens to the Fresh Prince theme song when you translate it out of English into one or more languages, then back to English. It's cool and worth a watch:

What did you think? Have you ever tried translating something and then seeing what happens when you translate it back again?