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[dchenes]

This is too good not to share.

Our Practice of Translation prof is sick today, so the French class combined with the Japanese class tonight. We were given a passage of Genesis and asked to rewrite it for any specific audience and in any genre we wanted. The one that got me was a funny story in which Eve eating the apple turned into a hamster being run over with a lawnmower. Yeah, I know, ick, but how do you get from "and Eve ate the apple, and found it good" to running over a hamster with a lawnmower?

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[dchenes.livejournal.com]

The passage was given to us in English, which isn't the native language for most of us, so there was some translation involved. Especially since it was somewhat archaic English. Anyway, one of the groups rewrote it as a couple of kids (Adam and Eve) who get a hamster on the condition that it stay in its cage. So of course a third kid (the snake) lets it out, and it runs out into the yard, and Dad (god) runs over it with the lawnmower and gets annoyed that it was out of the cage.

It was certainly more entertaining than my group's version. We merely simplified it and emphasized the peer pressure aspect, because our intended audience was pre-teenagers.