Lost in Translation - translate interesting phrases between English and other languages
"Language is the source of misunderstandings."
— Antoine de Saunt-Exupéry in The Little Prince
by Carl Tashian
What happens when an English phrase is translated (by computer) back and forth between 5 different languages? The authors of the Systran language translation software probably never intended this application of their program. As of September 2007, translation software is almost good enough to turn grammatically correct, slang-free text from one language into grammatically incorrect, barely readable approximations in another. But the software is not equipped for 10 consecutive translations of the same piece of text. The resulting half-English, half-foreign, and totally non sequitur response bears almost no resemblance to the original. Remember the old game of "Telephone"? Something is lost, and sometimes something is gained.
Some classic examples:
I'm a little tea pot, short and stout.
translates into
They are a small POTENTIOMETER, short circuits and a beer of malzes of
the tea.
a cookie is just a cookie, but fig newtons are fruit and cake.
translates into
biskuit has expert of biskuit, but Newton von Fig is fruit and hardens.
When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's amore.
translates into
If the moon fixes its eye like a great vector of Fleischpie of the
vector of Pizzapie, is the lover.
The Translation Application:
This site serves as an example of a dynamic web application. It uses HTML and a simple form processing program written in Perl. I don't know how to translate between five different languages, so I get translations from Babel Fish translation service instead. My program is merely a go-between.
This site has been a Site of the Day on CNN, a Yahoo! Pick, and has been written up in the Chicago Sun-Times, the SoCal Press-Enterprise, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Twin Cities Star Tribune, Asimov's Science Fiction, Holland's De Telegraaf, and on William Gibson's blog among many others. It is #253 in Dan Crowley's book, "505 Unbelievably Stupid Web P@ges"