These are good guesses but nope Actually I started listening to that audiobook and this kind of train of thought is like what’s happening in the book. I kind of wish I came up with an obscure one like that
As a hint, it’s more of a proverb than an idiom. What I mean is it’s a well used phrase,
Proverb: a short, well-known pithy saying, stating a general truth or piece of advice.
Idiom: a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words
I guess what I mean is the expression is quite literal. There are various interpretations of it but that probably depends more on beliefs. The obscurity is coming from the bad translation as opposed to being an obscure expression but with a well known meaning
Yeah that’s a good point to make, although I like the creativity of @Samraku
Actually as a separate similar game, more to the spirit of galactic pot healer, one could try to codify the idea of that game to some extent.
You could remove the reliance on some official translator and instead take phrases/expressions/book film titles etc but replace words by something categorically equivalent in some sense.
The first example in that audiobook was latticework gun-stinging insect.
Latticework came from grate, most likely of a metal grating, which is a homophone for great. Gun was gat. Stinging insect was a bee, so all together it was a book title (the) great gatsby.
So maybe some kind of rule like being able to use homophones and categorical abstraction/substitution to change a book film name/phrase/expression etc into the clue. By categorical abstraction I guess what I mean with the example a bee and a wasp could be seen as examples of stinging insects so it’s replaced by an abstraction. Or in the case of latticework and grating they’re similar in the sense of being a type of pattern? Or maybe the grating is a type of latticework.
There is meaning, sense, saying, intentions…
And there is moving denied, not pass, not go…
There’s “you”…
And it’s a proverb.
I found these:
What is meant for you won’t pass by you
If something is meant for you it won’t pass you by!
What’s for you, won’t pass you by
and so on…
There’s a lot of variations but I think one of them must be it!
Right, the examples in the book rely a lot on homophones and that’s the beauty of it: changing “great” with “grate” won’t happen in Google translator. But the twist of changing meaning with the same sound is the funny part.
(English → Turkish → English - I tried a few languages and the translations were hilariously wrong but translated back to the original sentence, sadly)
maybe its better to keep secret to which language you translated?
It makes possible to test your own guess. KAOSkonfused is correct, we already can know it without waiting
Correct, well done. I guess it wasn’t too hard, but I liked the meaning of the translation.
(Going through French, the translation became “Don’t sweat small stuff” - as in, please tune your perspiration to big drops. Imagine a sign in a sauna.)
While it’s convenient when just translating to one language works, we could also try tonybe’s idea
Pass it through multiple languages and then back to the starting one. It doesn’t have to be exactly the same ones but if they work, they work . I suppose when we’re hiding which language we used to translate it probably doesn’t matter if it was one or more languages, although maybe remembering which combinations worked well would be handy.
Actually I started listening to that audiobook and this kind of train of thought is like what’s happening in the book. I kind of wish I came up with an obscure one like that 
