May 3rd, 2006

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Internet
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Make Your Website Talk Funny

Martin writes with a roundtrip translator he put together:

Using Really Magazine’s new 2Xlation facility , you can view English-text websites and see how they might pan out after a round trip though the current state-of-the-art translation engines . . .( caution: may cause dismay / amusement / confusion etc etc )

It currently translates to Korean and then back into English. Here’s what the Guardian’s website looks like (”Blair shouts well! Bows in sack”), and here’s what my site looks like. Tod Maffin’s message about the CBC’s podcasting effort now reads like this:

The CBC the knock-down road or the contribution where the radio is free hazard the program which is effective now it is manufacturing the possibility which there is not a historical example, “ The best it includes the of” and for the thing in order total Hoeg, training, software advancement and the consultation— but I’ M it has a many month, for It?

Comments: 3 Responses so far

Gar Fisher
May 3rd, 2006
1:43 pm

I once heard that in the early days of translation programs, they translated the phrase ” the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak ” to Russian and back again. Guess what they got… “The vodka is good, but the meat is bad”!

Not much has changed.

-G

[Reply]

double-plus-ungood
May 3rd, 2006
2:08 pm

Phillip K. Dick anticipated this kind of stuff in Galactic Pot Healer, written in the late sixties. Players would pick a phrase or book title, run it through various translation computers, and then submit it for other people to guess the original phrase.

[Reply]

jd
May 5th, 2006
12:38 am

Part of the fun of working at a Korean university teaching English was getting homework that had been done in Korean and then pulled through an on-line translation. The students always looked confused when you pointed out that none of the sentences made any sense.

(I eventuaully found that telling a student that their work had brought all kinds of joy to the other teachers and that we’d posted it on the wall beside the lunch table was enough to ensure that the student never tried that trick again.)

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