>>Thanks for clarifying. I thought it was probably Romanian because of the little "thing" hanging down from the "t" in several words.
>
>The Romanian alphabet has 2 extra letters, which are S and T having “the little thing hanging down” - that changes the sound of them to something like Sh and Ts. This is all we pay for never having to spell anything, unless... we are talking in English.
>
>>Perhaps someone else can tell us if it was, in fact, in the August 2000 FoxTalk. Or maybe William O'Connor will just send the requester a copy of it.
>
>That would be easier and safer - translating the orignal back and forth a number of times, it could go from MSDE to MultipleSclerosis... ;)

Don't know if you ever played the game of deaf telephones - it was quite popular when I was a kid. The players line up, first one whispers the sentence to the second, second to third etc, and the last one pronounces it aloud. Then the first one pronounces the original, and everyone gets a good laugh from the distortion.

The interpreters once did that during a lunch at their congress. The first one got a sentence in his own language, and translated it (on a piece of paper) to the language of the guy next to him. This guy then translated it on the next piece of paper to the following guy, etc. The organizers have already taken care that everyone speaks the neighbor's language. The original sentence "the history of beer is as old as the history of mankind" eventually translated into "if there was no beer, there would be no humanity".