Google Translates the 'Fresh Prince' Rap Into 64 Languages and Back

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Will Smith's classic lines get flipped and turned upside down in the video below, at the mercy of Google's Translate algorithms. The musicians at cdza, a collective that makes funny music videos for YouTube, simply fed the text through one translation after another -- maxing out at 64 languages. Jeremie Harris's Will Smith impersonation and the live ensemble backing him up make for an entertaining spectacle: 

cdza's co-founder Joe Sabia calls this their "geekiest experiment ever:"

Technically speaking, all but the first verse were translated. The lyrics were translated from English to the world's most spoken language (Mandarin), to the second most (Spanish), to the third most, to the fourth most, ETC, putting all 64 languages in order by finding the demographic population size on every language on Wikipedia.

Fun facts: The last translation we put it through was "Esperanto", because apparently, only 10,000 people speak it. No one has an official language of "Latin", but we had to assume a lot of people are still able to speak it. So that was a bit ambiguous. Proper Nouns never really changed. Neither did numbers, as you can tell in the last stanza, "7, 8." We have no idea why we did this.

If this is their geekiest experiment, it's only by a small margin. Check out their madcap medley of mondegreens, below: 

For more by cdza, visit http://www.cdzamusic.com.

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Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg is a senior associate editor at The Atlantic. She curates the Video channel. More

Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg's work in media spans documentary television, advertising, and print. As a producer in the Viewer Created Content division of Al Gore's Current TV, she acquired and produced short documentaries by independent filmmakers around the world. Post-Current, she worked as a producer and strategist at Urgent Content, developing consumer-created and branded nonfiction campaigns for clients including Cisco, Ford, and GOOD Magazine. She studied filmmaking and digital media at Harvard University, where she was co-creator and editor in chief of H BOMB Magazine.

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