Despite our love of language, our skills as linguists are poor. When things get written about us in languages other than English, we are unable to pick out more than the odd word without resorting to cheap tools such as Google Translate. German is our favourite language for compound words and phrases that are beautiful to us and yet incomprehensible. Comedy often ensues from computerised (and over-literal) translation.

Hey Tube featured us this week and there must be a lot of slang or unusual verbiage in the piece, as the automatic translation struggled a bit with it. Phrases like “melancholische Mollakkorde” are gorgeous, though – we think that translates directly as “melancholy minor chords”. The snippet that titles this post also popped up to make us laugh, in a sentence comparing us with Saint Etienne – we think that’s a literal translation of a colloquial term and they mean our vocals are mopey/a bit wet blanket and Sarah Cracknell’s are more tender and loving, but that’s as far as we got. If anyone can help us with a more accurate translation of the feature, we would be very grateful.