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] OT - Machine translation

[Andrew Simmons]

> we hope the service we provide is useful for most purposes.
>
I'm not sure the service is useful, but it certainly helps while away the
dull hours waiting for my CORBA-generated stubs or skeletons, or whatever
they are called, to compile.

Those of you with work to do should stop reading now.

Those of you who don't might enjoy the following, also from an Italian
obituary:


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

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 ".