Thursday, October 25, 2007

High-tech "telephone" game

Carl Tashian's Multibabel is like that game we all used to play in grade school. It takes an English sentence as input, and plugs it into the AltaVista machine translation tool to interpret it into another language, then back into English. It then plugs that result into another language, and translates that back into English. After five cycles of this (or eight, if you click the button to include Chinese, Japanese and Korean), it's pretty amazing what you end up with. I tried:

Languages Scraps is my favorite blog!
After round 1 (Japanese):
The language scrap is blog of my taste!
After round 2 (Chinese):
The language discards is my taste blog!
...
After round 8 (Spanish):
The strong languages are blog of the mine the pleasure!

Oh, the possibilities! (Or, Good contingency!, if you prefer.)

[Found via Notes from a Linguistic Mystic]

1 comments:

Scott Abbott said...

And thus "The Task of the Translator."