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Mini-contest 2012: "Yogi Berra Quotes" » English to Chinese

Competition in this pair is now closed, and the winning entry has been announced.

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Source text in English

- "I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous."

- "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."

- "You can observe a lot just by watchin'."

- "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."

- "I can't concentrate when I'm thinking."

- "The future ain't what it used to be."

- "I'm not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did."

- "We're lost, but we're making good time."

- "Half the lies they tell about me aren't true."

- "A nickel ain't worth a dime anymore."

- "It's like deja-vu, all over again."

- "It ain't over till it's over."

- Mrs. Lindsay: "You certainly look cool." Yogi Berra: "Thanks, you don't look so hot yourself."

- "If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be."

There were 8 entries submitted in this pair during the submission phase.

Entries submitted in this pair were rated on a per-segment basis. Listed below are all submitted translations of each individual source text segment.

Submitted segment translations

Translations submitted for each source text segment are listed below. Segments have had surrounding punctuation stripped, and the resulting identical segments have been grouped together, so each listed translation should differ, but the difference may be subtle (eg. internal punctuation or diacritics).

Viewing segment # out of 14

Source text segment #6

- "The future ain't what it used to be."
Rank by:
+35
Incongruity created by referring to the future using a past tense/construction. There's also some ambiguity by what is meant as "the future", is it "the way we think about the future. The perception of the future is not as it once was.
+9 | -2
Something like "Ah, the good new days!"
+4
A friend put it in another way, while reading the obituary in the newspaper: "The people who are dying now never died before." In other words, "change is inevitable".
+5 | -1
As you get older, your expectations and capabilities diminish. When you thought about the future in the past, it looked great!
+2
He is referring to the future as 'the good ol' days'.
+2 | -1
Past used to be a future too, for the time before THAT past.
Isang simpleng pagpapahayag na di nagkakatugma ang mga inaasahang mangyayarai sa hinaharap mula sa aktwal na nangyayari.
+2 | -2
We have an expectation of what the future will be like, but if something happens that we did not foresee, the future that we expected is no longer the future that will actually occur.
+5 | -5
To me it means that the future, as it becomes the present, is not turning out like we expected...(probably worse )
+1 | -6
future, being future, can't be as it was used to be.
No one knows what's going to happen.

Translations of this segment (8 total; 8 unique)

未来，已经是今非昔比了
未来不再是过去应该成为的未来
未来和它的过去是不一样的
未来怎么越来越差呢
未来总不按常理出牌
过去常有的，都不算是未来
未來跟之前都不一樣了
未來再也不會像過去一樣
Viewing segment # out of 14