© 2003-2006 David Moles

Chrononautic Log

«  WTF? follow-up
  Main  
Mouse/Cylon hybrid discovered in North Carolina  »

art

Fun with machine translation

4 o'clock, May 9, 2006

Inspired by Ben’s discovery of a Chinese bootleg of his story “Embracing-the-New,” and his machine translation of it back into English, I ran a few paragraphs of “Planet of the Amazon Women” through a few Google translators, looking for found poetry.

Of that, the best I found is probably the English-Korean-English:

In the unreality which is born with the thing together each one and with the thing the together different person define my thing with the real thing history of my oneself to under justice it was incorrect together with Hippolyta, Hippolyta. That was attempting the fact that the presumed engine talks to me, it is.

That it passes from some feeling and is not fraud. We lead and untranslatable the picture of remembering and imagining we see a past. . . .

But the most amusing, considering the story, has to be finding the word “anomaly,” after translation into Arabic and then back into English, transmuted to “homosexuality.”

Comments

I'm picturing a blog meme or party game where you roundtrip-machine-translate the first paragraph of someone's story and they have to write a new story containing (or beginning with) one of the sentences.

Or perhaps we could come up with a roundtrip-machine-translation parlor game where certain manual operations (to regrammatify) were permitted in between iterations...

—— Benjamin Rosenbaum, 10:37 AM, Tuesday, May 9, 2006