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Re: [lojban] Abusing BabelFish



Ühel kenal päeval, K, 2007-03-21 kell 16:22, kirjutas Cyril Slobin:
> coi rodo
> 
> The site http://babelfish.altavista.com does a wonderful job of
> translating texts between different languages. Set of languages
> supported is impressive. An idea comes to mind to close BabelFish to
> itself, i.e. to feed it with it's own output. In other words, to
> coerce it to "Broken Phone" AKA "Chinese Whispers" mode. So I've
> written a script that does just this.

Some folklore: they say that a grand new shiny machine translation
(English-Russian-English) was finished and was to be demonstrated to an
important official who incidentally didn't speak Russian.

So they fed the phrase "Out of sight, out of mind" into the system.
History forgot what the Russian result was, but they fed the result back
into the system so that the important guy could read it too. The second,
English result was "Invisible idiot".

Yet another similar, probably unrelated story: the phrase "The spirit is
strong, but the flesh is weak" was translated into Russian as "Спирт ещё
крепкий, но мясо уже тухлое", meaning "The spirit/alchohol is still
strong/(has high percentage of ethanol), but the meat has already
putrefied".

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