...And I thought I couldn't translate things.

Anyway, this just goes to show how much technology is focusing on the pointless things as opposed to what is actually USEFUL.

http://www.ackuna.com/badtranslator

Basically, it takes your input, and, depending on how you set it, it will translate the input to and from a random language so many times. You're surprisingly likely to end up with a completely nonsensical result.

I just thought I'd share this.
"Kerm is an awesome programmer who likes fuzzy cats and buffalo wings"

...56 translations later Bing and Google give us:

"Honeysukkle reason for hope"
Original text:

"Ashbad made the first reply to my post. Yay! Who's next?"

...56 translations later Google gives us:

"Ho Chi Minh City, the first reaction in life! Who else?"
Quote:
16: 20 hours, seven years ago our forefathers brought to the European continent a new nation and freedom začenat dedicated to the place where all people are equal.
"How to drive a car"

56 translations later (both Google and Bing) I go:

"He"

Hm...
seana11 wrote:
Quote:
16: 20 hours, seven years ago our forefathers brought to the European continent a new nation and freedom začenat dedicated to the place where all people are equal.


Might I assume that's translated from "four score.."? Laughing
Original text:

[removed by administrator]

...10 translations later Google gives us:

[removed by administrator]
Ashbad wrote:
seana11 wrote:
Quote:
16: 20 hours, seven years ago our forefathers brought to the European continent a new nation and freedom začenat dedicated to the place where all people are equal.


Might I assume that's translated from "four score.."? :0x5:


yup.

And "f[this isn't actually here, I'm just sticking is here instead of the real words] you!" turned in to "Drugs!"
Lucas W wrote:
Original text:

[removed by administrator]

...10 translations later Google gives us:

[removed by administrator]


At least it stayed on topic Rolling Eyes
"Matt Smith is the 11th Doctor and the 2nd youngest actor to portray the character."

...10 translations later Google gives us:

"Matt Smith, a young doctor, and 11 represents the second player character."
I cannot explain this. This Portal reference gave me the word "cake" after the first translation.

Log: http://pastebin.com/r1uP91Lm

Laughing
Old concept wrapped up in a new web site. I feel like I first saw something like this applied around 10 years ago.

Machine translation is hard, and I'm impressed anything can do as well as it does. It's extremely hard to recognize idioms, so the loss of idioms as you shuffle a phrase back and forth between a number of languages adds up to get nonsense back out.
The effect can be amplified if your translation system makes an attempt to make things sound natural, since some nuance it picks up going one way usually won't be fixed up in the other direction. Simply put, it's not a tool designed to maintain strict understandability, it seeks to keep things sounding natural. It's rather like what happens if you apply lossy compression to the same video 1000 times.

Plenty of case studies to be had over on Language Log. A particularly informative example is Drawing a line in the noodles, which does particularly well in illustrating some of the many pitfalls in attempting to do any sort of translation from Chinese.

TL;DR: Tari is neither amused nor impressed?
Tari wrote:
TL;DR: Tari is neither amused nor impressed?
Neither am I, really. I've seen this plenty of times before, yet it seems to keep popping up as something novel and hilarious.
merthsoft wrote:
Tari wrote:
TL;DR: Tari is neither amused nor impressed?
Neither am I, really. I've seen this plenty of times before, yet it seems to keep popping up as something novel and hilarious.
Indeed, I remember that there was a site, for example, that would translate back and forth between English and Japanese until it reached a quiescent state. Machine translation is indeed an extremely hard problem, and as Tari says, it's very surprising to me that some of the best ones work as well as they do.

Techno: if you compare the translations, it seems someone made "GlaDOS" [English] == "Cake" [German]. Not exactly a coincidence, just an easter egg.
"I like pie."

...50 translations later Google gives us:

"I want cake."

CAKE IS NOT THE SAME AS PIE GODDAMN YOU!!!!
Lucas W wrote:
Original text:

[removed by administrator]

...10 translations later Google gives us:

[removed by administrator]


:/ Seems the administrators don't like double entendres...
This reminds me of a web site that will take an english phrase you type and translate it to Japanese and back to English until the translation is the same twice in a row.

I can't find the site but I'll keep looking.
comicIDIOT wrote:
This reminds me of a web site that will take an english phrase you type and translate it to Japanese and back to English until the translation is the same twice in a row.

I can't find the site but I'll keep looking.


I know what you're talking about. It's called "Translation Party". Another person I've met online, Travis Mick, took that same site and made it so you can use any Google Translate language, not just Japanese, and do the same thing.

Here's the original:

http://translationparty.com/

I can't find his modified version though. He might have removed it.
I thought I'd give it a little De Morgan, courtesy of GEB:
Quote:
Original text:

"The flag is not moving and the wind is not moving. It is not true that either the flag or the wind is moving."

...56 translations later Bing and Google give us:

"Science of climate change are the signs of bad weather."
Original text:

"How can we sleep while our beds are burning? How can be dance while our Earth is turning?"

...10 translations later Google gives us:

"Fire, even if we have a bed to sleep or not. You can dance, dance, we believe that the world is round?"
  
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