A cat translator

August 22, 2013 • 2:53 pm

From this week’s SMBC, courtesy of reader Steve:

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There are two things wrong with this cartoon:

1. Nobody would name their cat “Scruffles”. (The inevitable result of that statement is that some reader will say he/she owns a cat named Scruffles.)

2. I don’t think the translation is accurate. A more likely one is “Where the hell is my dinner?”  But readers are invited to supply their own translations.

30 thoughts on “A cat translator”

  1. “Get this thing off my head. I’m not a member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.”

  5. I think it’s far more likely it was:
    “Bring back the old CRT monitors, people. These LCD crap have no warm top to sleep on. Sometimes I think humans are very stupid.”

  8. It’s Kit Marmalade, the poetry cat:

    Everybody knows
    that nothing rhymes with ‘orange’,
    except:
    binge, cringe, fringe, ginge,
    hinge, challenge, minge, impinge,
    singe, tinge, whinge and of course,
    lozenge.
    there could be more.
    look it up in a dictionary –
    preferably rhyminge.

  9. When I had my cat, he didn’t like other cats (naturally). Our back yard, however, seemed to be a meeting place for all the local cats, so often when the sun was strong we’d have 5 or 6 other cats all lying around. Obviously my cat wasn’t impressed with them all in his territory (the yard was very small), but rather than going after them, he would walk through them and show them who was boss, and then jump and lie down on the wall above them all, looking down, surveying, as the lord cat of the manor.

    I miss him 🙁

  11. Translations from the cat:

    Meow! – give me treatz
    Mrowr! – give me treatz
    Rowrrr, hiss – I see another cat outside!
    Chirp – are you awake yet? give me treatz
    Mowwwww – I am lonely. Amuse me, human.
    Mrrrrr – I love you. Where are my treatz?
    Prrrrrrr – I love it when you give me treatz.

    No, JAC, I don’t own a cat named Scruffles. I own two cats, hight “Gypsy” and “Cuddles”, their respective nicknames being “Bazalgette” and “Brunel”.

      1. You win an internet all your very own for knowing that.

        No, Gypsy/Bazalgette is not a sewer cat, though she loves to drink from the spout in the bathtub. She is more properly described as a wide-body model cat.

  14. I have two Siamese overlords and they make their demands perfectly understood. No translator necessary.

  15. “I will kill you all in your sleep for this indignity.” Or possibly, “Feed me!”

    1. I like how those two sentences a diametrically opposed. It’s my belief that cat language would be so nuanced that you could mean the second sentence but very easily speak the first one, all because of a missed meow patterned diphthong.

  20. Also a bit off-topic… I notice that the mother of the Looney Tune kittens has a yellow arm. Can some biologist tell me if she might be a chimera? The point is that human chimeras exist, and that raises the question as to whether G*d inserted two souls at conception into each of the fusing embryos? Just asking.

  21. Some years ago in Oz, there was an ad for whiskas (a popular brand of cat food) and in the ad a cat started typing on a computer keyboard ‘I want my whiskas’.
    In a parody on a comedy show soon after, the cat typed out ‘I want my balls back’.

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