Machine translation or Faulkner?

by Mikhail Simkin


Can you tell the prose that won a Nobel Prize from the text that needs editing?

Each quote below is either machine-translated German text or a sample of William Faulkner's prose.

After each quote indicate what it is. Hit the Submit button when done. The quiz will be graded and you will see the correct answers.


He would be sort of grand too, pulling in lonely state across the noon, rowing himself right out of noon, up the long bright air like an apotheosis, mounting into a drowsing infinity…

1. Machine translation Faulkner


...if people could only change one another forever that way merge like a flame swirling up for an instant then blown cleanly out along the cool eternal dark...

2. Machine translation Faulkner


Before my soul like a curtain pulled itself away, and the scene of the infinite life transforms before me into the abyss of the eternally open grave.

3. Machine translation Faulkner


I will am my fathers Progenitive I invented him created I him Say it to him it will not be for he will say I was not and then you and I since philoprogenitive

4. Machine translation Faulkner


It was a shadow, that lay, in every beautiful weather once under a tree and fluctuated like the branches in the Wind.

5. Machine translation Faulkner


However, the honeysuckle had already withered, the dandelion glittered and now gilded the meadows, and now certainly there was over there on the brook already forget-me-not.

6. Machine translation Faulkner


They praise the tree as shadow donor, they don't praise the shadow, that the whole day be ready and always rotate beautifully with the sun and not with Wind...

7. Machine translation Faulkner


...the marquee empty of eating the road empty in darkness in silence the bridge arching into silence darkness sleep the water peaceful and swift not goodbye...

8. Machine translation Faulkner


It lay on the table a candle burning at each corner upon the envelope tied in a soiled pink garter two artificial flowers. Not hit a man in glasses.

9. Machine translation Faulkner


...that did not learn anything, something to learn never wanted, which can do also purely technically and physically nothing from vague and intractable pride that men can do...

10. Machine translation Faulkner


And thus I reel fearful. Sky and earth and her weaving forces around me: I see nothing as a forever devouring, forever going on monster.

11. Machine translation Faulkner


The chair-arm flat cool smooth under my forehead shaping the chair the apple tree leaning on my hair above the eden clothes by the nose seen...

12. Machine translation Faulkner