The Geureat Kechupi ploject

If you read Dokdo is Ours or @Koreangov (two excellent satirical websites on Korea), you may have heard of The Geureat Kechupi ploject - otherwise known affectionately as the 'Great Gatsby Project'. If you live in Korea or have been to Korea, you may known how poorly some signs are written, or how badly English is used in the country. This project has a little bit of fun with it.

Start with one page from the Great Gatsby (to keep things straight, they're using the same PDF version), then 'translate' it. Using Google Translate doesn't count. Several different styles are suggested here, including 'middle school student' or 'Korean promotional brochure'. The idea isn't to completely mangle the text, but to keep it's original meaning while making it funny in the process.

So without further ado, I give you my contribution to the Geureat Kechupi ploject.

Original from page 6:

I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove. It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road. ‘How do you get to West Egg village?’ he asked helplessly. I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood. And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the ‘Yale News’—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the ‘well-rounded man.’ Tis isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, afer all.

My 'translation':

Me dog a had, but runned off after days some. No much own, but old bad Dahjee teurakeu and Pinish married woman. Her bed was made and food too, but her didn't speakee Korean. Why she no speak the Korean mother tong? My lonely felt. Morning some strangee foreigner ased my direcktions. Him said. "How you get to village West of the Egg?" I said he, "why you see village West of the Egg? See go Gyeongbukgung palace, Korea's palace for many hundred of year. Pitcrues with man with bad fake hair facial and guided tour too!" Felt me good. I breathed air clean as Seoul. I now neighborhood and my country home of Korea! I go to Kyobo read to the book. My buy 12 book on money, money making, and card credit to learn secret of Goldman. I make promise to read many book - book on Korea, book on our Dokdo island, book on evil Japan, and book on bad foreigner. I write for Korea Time, and know I people read my editaroil. Dey is impotent because they are quiet. My to be a good shaped person to serve and live my country. Know life much better through apateu window, right?

Creative Commons License © Chris Backe - 2009


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