>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.

Yes, we played it the way you did, we called it wireless telephone - what an avant-garde name!!

>
>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".

In this case, it could be because the final sentence could be true (in the sense that without beer the humanity could have disappeared), while the first is certainly false?