What are you reading right now?

Yesterday, I was sorting through some old things and found a couple of paper books. One, Vartanyan's "Journey into Words," turned out to be an interesting read for bedtime.
I'm sharing an excerpt from the chapter about translations and translators. ))

Each of the invited participants, possessing excellent knowledge of two related languages, had to receive a text from their colleague, translate it into another language, and pass it on to the next person. The participants in this endeavor were precise and conscientious, both in receiving and transmitting the translated text.
The starting point was an excerpt from N.V. Gogol's "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Argued with Ivan Nikiforovich."
It was just a phrase, with which the great Russian writer characterized the character of the story, Agafya Fedoseevna:
She gossiped and ate boiled beets in the morning, and she was also very good at cursing – and with all these various activities, her face never changed its expression, which is usually only shown by women.
The translators, having received the text, began to work.
If little changed in the English version, then in the German version, the restrained word "gossiped" turned into the expressive "chattered," and the face – it remained completely expressionless, as every woman knows how to do.
The next link in this chain was the Japanese language. Its inherent refinement prompted the specialist to replace the emotional "chattered" with the more neutral "talked," and the energetic "cursed" with the softer "slandered."
In the Arabic language, Gogol's character no longer simply "talked," but "chattered," and not just "slandered," but began to "utter terrible curses."
The Frenchman who took over the baton concluded the first stage of the linguistic experiment as follows: She had a habit of chattering while eating beet broth; a stream of carefully selected words flew from her mouth, and all this without the slightest expression on her face. That's how all women do.
Although this version of the fragment already differed significantly from the original, the translation's misadventures were only just beginning.
Passing through the Indonesian language, in which the personal pronouns "he" and "she" are denoted by the same word, then through Dutch and Turkish, the phrase transformed as follows: While the woman, eating liquid beet broth, let out curses, the man was engaged in chatter. They did this without showing their feelings, as is customary for women.
In Spanish, nothing changed, except that instead of the word "let out," the word "threw out" was used. Translated from Spanish to the Yoruba language by a resident of Sudan: he approached the task creatively, changing the specific beet broth into a general broth made from the fruits of the earth, and the general one was engaged in chatter into the specific one boasting about his imaginary exploits.
The next translator, fluent in Yoruba, returned the text to English, adding his own lexical corrections. He clarified the fruits of the earth – fruits, corrected "threw out curses" as "threw out bad things," and conveyed the expression "boasting about his imaginary exploits" with the English idiom "beat the drums."
The new reading of Gogol's excerpt was then translated from English into the language of the African Bambara tribe, from it again into French, where "things" turned into "objects," and then into Italian: She drank compote and threw out unnecessary things from the house, and he beat the drum, expressing almost feminine delight.
The reasons for this transformation are obvious. Liquid fruit broth is, of course, compote! Beating the drums doesn't necessarily have to be understood only in a figurative sense. And where there are drums, there is a tambourine!
The development of a new line of thought occurred absolutely logically. In Czech, unnecessary things were translated more simply – old junk, under the influence of the tambourines, the house was reduced to a hut, and feminine delight was replaced by a brief and exhaustive "delighted." The Norwegian resolutely corrected the Czech version: not delighted, but joyfully. The Swede added stylistic coherence with a participial phrase: Having drunk compote, she… and so on.
And so, the final phase of the experiment arrived – comparing the excerpt with the original language. Now, after the conscientious efforts of two dozen translators, having passed through the traditions, laws, character, and features of various languages, Gogol's phrase transformed into lines that were absurdly funny.
Having drunk compote, she threw out the old junk from the hut, and he joyfully beat the drum.
The chain was closed. The "broken telephone" mechanism worked.