If you haven’t already seen this yonks ago, for a bit of banal fun take a mini-break from what you’re doing and try this experiment with Babelfish over at Lost in Translation to see what happens when an English phrase is translated (by computer) back and forth between 5 different languages. The website also has the dubious honour of being included in Dan Crowley’s book 505 Unbelievably Stupid Web Pages (at number 253). Just hit ‘Babelize’ to see what the tool comes up with.
3 users responded in " #253 of 505 Unbelievably Stupid Web P@ges "
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If this house of the crystal to extinguish itself of rock. | The GITS Blog said,
in October 20th, 2008 at 1:56 am
[...] tip to blogging translator for mentioning the [...]
Judy Jenner said,
in October 22nd, 2008 at 5:56 am
Oh, hilarious. Thanks for sharing. I have often relied on Babelfish to demonstrate why translators are essential (I used this mainly with engineers, software developers, etc.) and always got my point across — Babelfish really does make it easy to argue for the importance of a real human translator. However, I hadn’t tried this one for several languages yet. Must bookmark to get a laugh during high-pressure translation days! Had a great time seeing what came out of “I had a long leisurely lunch at Brio today and shared a bottle of wine” — priceless. (Brio is a restaurant here in Las Vegas, BTW).
tajnica said,
in November 3rd, 2008 at 8:21 pm
This is really funny, I am definitely forwarding it to other translators
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