From: "Andrew Simmons" <andrew@mbmnz.co.nz>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] very OT - Machine translation
Date: Wed, 15 May 2002 19:28:02 +1200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20020515074009.EXJE19830.mta4-rme.xtra.co.nz@[210.55.150.106]> (raw)
> Isn't this the long lost conclusion to Alan Sokal's "Transgressing the
> Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity"
> that was inadvertently omitted when published in "Social Text"?
>
Fine though Sokal's article was, this is not really fair on the late, great
Quine. Machine translation wreaks havoc on even the clearest writing - as an
experiment, I have run the first verse of one of Australia's most beautiful
folk songs through Babelfish, from English to Italian and then back again.
This is the original:
I was down by Bondi Pier
Drinking tubes of ice-cold beer
With a bucket full of prawns upon my knee
When I'd swallowed the last prawn
I had a technicolour yawn
And I chundered in the old Pacific sea
And here is what Babelfish did to it:
I was down from the drinking tubes of the Bondi Pier of beer ghiacciata with
a full bucket of the gamberetti on mine ginocchio when swallowed the last
one gamberetto that I have had one sbadiglio of the technicolour and
chundered in the old pacific sea.
Mind you, if you take a return journey using Portugese, you get this:
I age for lower for the pipes drinking of Bondi Wharf of the beer I
hoist-cold with a full bucket of the prawns in top of my knee when I engoli
the last prawn that I had a yawn of technicolour and I chundered in the old
pacific sea
next reply other threads:[~2002-05-15 7:28 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 2+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2002-05-15 7:28 Andrew Simmons [this message]
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2002-05-14 10:14 [9fans] " Andrew Simmons
2002-05-15 1:00 ` [9fans] very " Vladimir G. Ivanovic
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