My favourite piece of Internet history

Facelikeapotato@lemmy.ml to Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world – 735 points –
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Making this must have been exhausting. I have a hard enough time coming up with one name in an RPG. I want to hear the story of the guy who had to come up with all of this.

What I've found helps me is picking three or four character traits I'm going to roleplay and run them through a translator twice (ex. English -> Hawaiian-> Czech turns 'tenacious' into věrnost. Then I'd judge how badly I'd pronounce it and English-ify it a little to Verno or Varnost)

It helps to pick languages that have a few language barriers between where they originated. Like English -> German doesn't work because they share a common root language and half of German speaks English as a second language now.

I use a variation of this to write music rounds for quizzes. Run lyrics through a translator then back to English and get people to name the song. My last round was called Korea Change (i.e I translated it to Korean and back).