Re: [9fans] very OT - Machine translation

Re: [9fans] very OT - Machine translation

[Andrew Simmons]

> 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

Re: [9fans] very OT - Machine translation

[Vladimir G. Ivanovic]

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"?

--- Vladimir

See http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html

--------
Vladimir G. Ivanovic                        http://leonora.org/~vladimir
2770 Cowper St.                                         vladimir@acm.org
Palo Alto, CA 94306-2447                                 +1 650 678 8014

"AS" == Andrew Simmons <andrew@mbmnz.co.nz> writes:


  AS> What remains therefore of Quine? The merit to have dissolved with
  AS> reasonings of an extraordinary thinness many philosophical
  AS> distinctions of "principle" in simple pragmatic issues of "degree"
  AS> (merit that are been worth it a verbo to its name in the
  AS> divertentissimo and irriverente Philosophical Lexicon di Daniel
  AS> Dennett: " to quineare: to deny decidedly the existence or the
  AS> importance of something of real or meaningful"). Its radical
  AS> naturalismo, that it sees the task of the philosophy in continuity
  AS> with the scopes of science, that denies whichever possibility of
  AS> "cosmic exile" from which watching the world to outside of the
  AS> theory that we have constructed in order to observe it. The
  AS> ability "to dissolve in ways to speak the mobilio about our
  AS> world", like a Prospero of the philosophy, declaring that "Being
  AS> is being the value of one variable" to the inside of the theory in
  AS> which impegnamo describing the world to us, and with defending one
  AS> realistic position. Its style of writing of rare elegance, the
  AS> immense one corpus of examples of enunciates to you
  AS> philosophically problematic of which the philosophy reviews are
  AS> still sature. Its pragmatism and its refinement in
  AS> "ding-dramatize" the philosophical dichotomies that they made it
  AS> to conclude, in answer to the friend and master Rudolf Carnap:
  AS> "the culture of our fathers is weaving of enunciates to you. In
  AS> our hands dumb it evolve and [... ] E' one grey, black culture of
  AS> facts and white woman of conventions. But I have not found some
  AS> reason substantial in order to conclude that there are in it spins
  AS> of all the black ones and others of the all white men ".