Wednesday 4 June 2008

OMG. Srsly? LOL!

The Better Bibles Blog points us to a new Bible translation: yep, you guessed it, an entire Bible in LOLCatSpeak. To give you a general idea, here’s the translation of 1 Timothy 1:17-20:

“Dear Invisibl Ceiling Cat, u pwn; plz hav honor n glory 4ever kthxbai. OK Timothy, now iz time 4 u 2 fite da good fite,19 wif fayth n good conscience n stuff, not liek Hymenaeus n Alexander cuz dey say bad stuffs about Ceiling Cat, so I makeded them go 2 hel HAHAHAHAHA lusers.”

You can also read a translation of all the arguments for God’s existence. And here’s the translation of the Lord’s Prayer:

Praise Ceiling Cat, yu be watchin us, yu can has cheezburger.
Wut yu want, yu gets, srsly.
In ceiling and on teh flor.
Giv us dis day our dalee cheezburger.
And furgiv us for makin yu a cookie, but eateding it.
And we furgiv wen cats steel our cookiez.
An do not let us leed into teh showa, but deliver us from teh wawter.
Ceiling Cat pwns all. He pwns teh ceiling and teh floor and walls 2.
Forevur and evuhr. Amen.


WTF?

Anyway, as far as I can tell, the only theological problem with this project is that God is translated “Ceiling Cat,” while Satan becomes the “Basement Cat.” So there’s, like, two Big Cats in town? Srsly? GTFO.

8 Comments:

Pseudonym said...

o hai! i does translashun. let me show it to u...

Back in the day, there was a project to translate the Bible into Klingon. A really interesting discussion happened about whether the translation should be formal or dynamic. The formalists, for example, felt that "loaves" and "fish" should be translated as "grain food" and "sea animal", but the dynamicists argued that things more relevant to Klingon culture would be more appropriate. In this case, "blood pies" and "water serpents".

The LOLCat Bible project is very much a dynamic translation, so there's a lot of discussion on the cosmology of Feline Christianity. But there's also a real sense of trying to avoid the ecclesiastical jargon that's been attached to Bible translation since the Vulgate. In this sense, it's more like Andy Gaus' Unvarnished New Testament than any other version I'm aware of.

Consider, for example, Matthew 5:29-30. The NET is a typical English translation:

"If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away! It is better to lose one of your members than to have your whole body thrown into hell. If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away! It is better to lose one of your members than to have your whole body go into hell."

The word translated "hell" is, of course, "Gehenna", which is the Hinnom gulch, used as a perpetually burning rubbish tip. The LOLCat translation:

"if ur eye sins, scratch it out with ur claws, or uz betr off in trashcan, srsly. if ur paw sins, bite it off, or uz betr off in trashcan, srsly."

There's a sense in which it's more accurate than most English translations, because it doesn't use the loaded term "hell" to refer to what is actually a physical location outside Jerusalem.

Anonymous said...

And the guy in charge of the translation is an atheist. wtf?

Anonymous said...

My bible doesn't even mention purrrrrgatory...

Matheson said...

"WTF?" made my day. Thanks Ben :)

Anonymous said...

Satan ain't.

Satan ain't no cat.

One of Freedom said...

I love Genesis 1:1 -

Oh hai.

That is so funny.

Anonymous said...

i love john 1.5 'the light shines in the darkness but the darkness has not understood it'.

Teh lite iz pwns teh darks, but teh darks iz liek "Wtf."

Ben Myers said...

Thanks, Anon: that's a marvellous translation of John 1:5!

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