Saturday, June 24, 2006
Just for fun
I've always been tickled by Mark Twain's hyperliteral retranslation of his Jumping Frog story from a French magazine. It's a precursor of today's machine translation.
Actually, though, today's translation software does such a good job between European languages that it's no longer fun! You can get good stuff by taking a page into Japanese and back into English, but that often gives such total gibberish that it isn't amusing. A quick way to get some fine silliness is to start with an English webpage, then tell Babelfish to translate it FROM French or Portuguese INTO English. About 80% of the original text comes through straight, but when the spelling of an English word happens to fit into the French dictionary, the result is wonderful. For some reason, such accidental correspondences often turn out to be vulgarly appropriate.
For a quick example, here's the Mill as Google takes it "from French" into English. ¶ 8:16 PM
Actually, though, today's translation software does such a good job between European languages that it's no longer fun! You can get good stuff by taking a page into Japanese and back into English, but that often gives such total gibberish that it isn't amusing. A quick way to get some fine silliness is to start with an English webpage, then tell Babelfish to translate it FROM French or Portuguese INTO English. About 80% of the original text comes through straight, but when the spelling of an English word happens to fit into the French dictionary, the result is wonderful. For some reason, such accidental correspondences often turn out to be vulgarly appropriate.
For a quick example, here's the Mill as Google takes it "from French" into English. ¶ 8:16 PM
