* * * * *
                                        
                          It bites tadpole of the wax
                                        
> What happens when an English phrase is translated (by computer) back and
> forth between 5 different languages? The authors of the Systran [1]
> translation software probably never intended this application of their
> program. As of April 2002, translation software is almost good enough to
> turn grammatically correct, slang-free text from one language into
> grammatically incorrect, barely readable approximations in another. But the
> software is not equipped for 10 consecutive translations of the same piece
> of text. The resulting half-English, half-foreign, and totally non sequitur
> response bears almost no resemblance to the original. Remember the old game
> of “Telephone”? Something is lost, and sometimes something is gained. 
> 

Via Mr. Barrett [2], Lost in Translation [3] 

It's a neat little application that uses BableFish [4] to convert to and from
English five times and produces some rather amusing translations (Welcome to
Engrish.com) [5]. We have years yet before anything remotely close to a
universal (The Darmok Dictionary---a language where the words are understood
but the meaning is lost) [6] translator (English as She is Spoke) [7] is
invented. 

Oh, and the title? That's what you get when you translate a transliteration
[8] of an American company (Coca-Cola) [9] into Chinese through the above
application. 

[1] http://www.systransoft.com/
[2] http://www.mrbarrett.com/mt/archives/2002_10_12.html#000438
[3] http://www.tashian.com/multibabel/
[4] http://babelfish.altavista.com/
[5] http://www.engrish.com/
[6] http://www.chaparraltree.com/sflang/darmok.shtml
[7] http://www.fragment.com/~ganz/spoke.html
[8] http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/tadpole.asp
[9] http://www.coke.com/

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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