[HN Gopher] Translate a message 10 times into different language...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Translate a message 10 times into different languages and back
        
       Author : firstSpeaker
       Score  : 123 points
       Date   : 2022-04-27 06:15 UTC (16 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (loneliness.one)
 (TXT) w3m dump (loneliness.one)
        
       | jslakro wrote:
       | What translation engine are you using for this project?
        
       | escape_goat wrote:
       | Given a source language and a destination language, I wonder if a
       | linguist could design a series of translations that exacerbate
       | the loss of meaning which occurs when words are automatically
       | translated from the context of one language to another. When I
       | write something that I intend to automatically translate, or that
       | I know will likely be read in translation, I often use a simple
       | reflexive translation from source through destination and back to
       | source in order to detect any lack of clarity in my words. Seeing
       | a smoother, more automated feedback while writing for translation
       | would help people improve their communications.
        
       | vorticalbox wrote:
       | I tried "hello world" it came back simply as "death"
        
       | js2 wrote:
       | If this reminds you of a game played in a PKD short-story, but
       | can't recall which story, it's _Galactic Pot-Healer_ :
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30701415
        
       | tikimcfee wrote:
       | > I want to help make the world a better place for everyone to
       | live in, to thrive in, and to be their best selves for themselves
       | and each other.
       | 
       | Became
       | 
       | > I like the world living for everyone, I still help me and the
       | best place for each other.
       | 
       | Always worries me I'm just one mistranslation away from my intent
       | being completely lost in the medium of the message...
       | 
       | Actually, this has me intensely curious: there have to be people
       | doing ML for automated translation, right? Is one of the
       | parameters of the translation that you get back what you put in
       | originally? I understand there's "language divides", and that
       | only helps to deepen the necessity to actually rely on algorithms
       | that are making sure the intent of the message is carried... if
       | we can't write an algorithm for it right now, maybe we can throw
       | CPUs at it until a net of random weights gives us 99.9% of the
       | same text and message.
       | 
       | (One more edit, this is fun) One more pass resulted in, trailing
       | comma and all:
       | 
       | > People have to live, people are alive,
        
       | zorlack wrote:
       | "The sun warms my back this morning" -> "This morning, the sun
       | will shine on my house again."
       | 
       | "Back" somehow became shelter?
        
       | RobertRoberts wrote:
       | Telephone game: "Translating words through many languages and
       | back is like playing the telephone game." -> "Your words in many
       | languages and return to phone games."
       | 
       | Do NOT use auto-translate for political speeches: "Ask not what
       | your country can do for you but what you can do for your country"
       | -> "Don't ask what you can do for your country. But what can you
       | do in your country?"
        
         | dr_orpheus wrote:
         | Even when using real translators, there have been issues
         | political speeches. I don't remember the exact context but at
         | the height of the Cold War there was a meeting at the UN and
         | the USSR representative said an idiom that was meant to be
         | treated as "we (communism) will outlive you (capitalism)", but
         | is more literally translated as "we will bury you" which tends
         | to have a different connotation in English.
         | 
         | Edit: It was Nikita Khrushchev at the Polish Embassy with
         | Western ambassadors:
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_will_bury_you
        
       | yosito wrote:
       | I have a lot of international friends. A majority of them speak
       | fluent English. But sometimes I like to send them short messages
       | in their native languages which I don't speak, just for fun. When
       | I started doing this, ten years ago, machine translation was far
       | worse than it is now, so I would often pass a translation through
       | a few languages and back to make sure that what I was saying held
       | a pretty consistent meaning when translated. If not, I could re-
       | work the original into something simpler or more literal.
       | 
       | While doing that, I often thought it would be fun to play the
       | kids game "Telephone" with my international friends where instead
       | of the classic version of just whispering what you heard to the
       | person next to you in the same language and seeing what comes out
       | at the other end, each person would translate what they heard
       | into their native language and before passing it on. It's a
       | little tricky to play in real life because you have to line
       | people up according to their language pairs, but doing it with
       | machine translation works, and it's a lot of fun to see what
       | happens with this.
        
         | notRobot wrote:
         | Ooh, that sounds like a lot of fun, I'd love to play that game
         | with my online friends sometime!
        
       | khazhoux wrote:
       | "I sometimes wonder if it's ok to put forks inside my pants" ->
       | "You can see that pierce with pier and pier."
        
       | lekevicius wrote:
       | "I like pizza" survived exactly.
        
       | vishnugupta wrote:
       | Hello, good morning. ---> Hi how to do it ---> How is it going
       | ---> how are you --> What is the move right now? --> How is
       | travel transportation?
        
       | xdennis wrote:
       | Reminds me of the message the pope of Rome sent to the Mongol
       | khan. It did a bad job of explaining Christianity even in it's
       | original Latin, but since there were no Latin to Mongol speakers
       | it had to be translated through numerous other interpreters.
       | Unsuprisingly the khan didn't understand anything.
       | 
       | Here's the begining translated to English:
       | 
       | > The immense benevolence of God the father, considering with
       | ineffable piety the fall of mankind, which came to ruin by the
       | sin of the first man, and wishing with great love to mercifully
       | revive him whom diabolic envy has made prostrate by deceitful
       | suggestion, has sent his only-begotten son, sharing the same
       | nature with him, from the highest throne of heaven to the lowest
       | dirt of the world, he who, conceived in the womb of the pre-
       | elected virgin by the grace of the Holy Spirit and endowed there
       | with the clothing of human flesh, thenceforth appeared to all,
       | having exited from the enclosed gate of his mother's virginity.
       | 
       | The rest:
       | https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Dei_Patris_Immens...
       | 
       | And here it is passed through this 10 times translator, perhaps
       | approximating what the khan heard:
       | 
       | > Their women's father believes that the kidney is the most
       | quantity of waste in the sky. He came into the world in rape of
       | rape and done with the human body. The sword appears to my mom.
        
       | bjstrevy wrote:
       | I manually did it through Google Translate using the first result
       | of top languages in the world and it wasn't too far off.
       | 
       | "Translate a message 10 times into different languages and back."
       | -> English -> Mandarin(Chinese Simplified) -> Hindi -> Spanish ->
       | French -> Arabic -> Bengali -> Russian -> Portuguese ->
       | Indonesian -> English "Translate messages into multiple languages
       | and return 10 times."
        
       | alex_young wrote:
       | > _" When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for
       | one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected
       | them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth,
       | the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of
       | Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of
       | mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel
       | them to the separation."_
       | 
       | ---
       | 
       | "During folk events, people should publish political groups.
       | Related to others and others between an independent army God gave
       | them laws and laws. They confirm that people will be expressed in
       | the ministry's opinion."
        
       | gorkempacaci wrote:
       | It would have been cool to see a translation to the original
       | language at every step, to reveal the gradual loss of meaning.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | NemuriBaku wrote:
       | "The human is almost extinct in the wild. A captive breeding
       | program has been phenomenally successful. Sometimes humans say
       | they eat nachos like an animal, as though they aren't one." -> "A
       | man disappears in the forest. The prisoner's system was
       | successful. Sometimes people say they are animals."
        
       | ItsBob wrote:
       | The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog --> Bad F. FO FRO GRO
       | 
       | Lol
        
         | jack_pp wrote:
         | I got "Fast Nasio Fox turned unknown dogs"
        
       | muhammadusman wrote:
       | hello - armpits
        
       | jackblemming wrote:
       | Could something like this be used as a loss function in a neural
       | net? It seems like perfect translations could be translated back
       | and forth many times.
        
         | mechanical_bear wrote:
         | Your comment run through a few times:
         | 
         | The great Bible translation is the best idea to live your life.
        
         | mrastro wrote:
         | Maybe it'd work for certain languages and phrases but many
         | words/phrases have imperfect translations across languages and
         | the same sentence could map to multiple valid translations.
        
         | isoprophlex wrote:
         | Yeah this idea has been tried before, see for example the
         | cycleGAN architecture (not for language, but image-to-image
         | translation)
         | 
         | https://bellchen.me/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/LUOHAO_151325...
        
       | vkazanov wrote:
       | "A fat cat was eating" -> "the fat cat was food"
        
         | skitter wrote:
         | Makes me think of toki pona, which doesn't distinguish between
         | eating and being food.
        
         | speedylight wrote:
         | You are what you eat after all, so this is technically correct
         | haha.
        
       | lominming wrote:
       | Tried "Hello" thinking that (1) it will be the easiest, and (2)
       | probably I will get some variation of a greeting back (hi, hey,
       | ...). Instead, I got:
       | 
       | Hello -> Lac
        
       | bloak wrote:
       | Nice!
       | 
       | There's a radiator key in the bureau. - The underground has a key
       | to the office.
        
       | chainwax wrote:
       | This could use a loading indicator.
        
       | dhosek wrote:
       | Back in the 80s, there was a small piece in _Omni_ magazine where
       | they talked about early machine translation efforts and the
       | phrase, "Out of sight, out of mind," translated to Russian and
       | back became "Invisible insanity."
       | 
       | This process gave me "To see, thoughts."
       | 
       | My writing group's website was scraped and translated into
       | Chinese for a gambling spam site (I don't really understand why).
       | There were some oddly poetic bits in the Google translation
       | results for the page that I looked at, my favorite being one
       | member's name, Billy Gee, became Billy Wow.
        
         | _tom_ wrote:
         | "Invisible idiot" is how I remember it.
        
         | kgeist wrote:
         | I heard a different one, the Russian saying "The spirit is
         | willing but the flesh is weak" returned back as "The vodka is
         | good but the meat is rotten".
        
           | MaysonL wrote:
           | I ran "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" through
           | the meat-grinder a few times, till it hit a fixed point at "A
           | group of animals".
        
       | RandomRandy wrote:
       | "I am nothing more than a sentient being suffering while waiting
       | for the sweet release of death." -> "I won't wait for a living
       | because I don't expect to live from life."
       | 
       | I too don't expect to live from life
        
       | titaniumtown wrote:
       | I made a program like this years ago. it was very fun messing
       | around with it.
        
       | substation13 wrote:
       | Urgent brown foxes are jumping lazy dogs.
        
         | mwint wrote:
         | Mine took a different route from (I assume) the same initial
         | input: "The brown fox jumped quickly on the lazy dog." Which
         | isn't really that much loss, I think.
        
       | braum wrote:
       | "What would you do for a Klondike bar?"
       | 
       | "It is? What would you do for clone drinks?"
        
       | _tom_ wrote:
       | This would be more fun if they showed a translation back to
       | English after each step, so you could see how it changed at each
       | step. (Approximately)
       | 
       | This is one of the most fun parts of the game of telephone, going
       | through the circle again, and having each person say out loud
       | what the thought they heard.
        
         | frankhorrigan wrote:
         | I built something last week to do exactly this. I think if I
         | post it here it will get HN hug of death'd because it's on a
         | free Heroku tier and has an API limit. But DM me if you'd like
         | the link.
        
       | colordrops wrote:
       | How many forests can produce firewood. Can you have wooden
       | forests?
       | 
       | .
       | 
       | .
       | 
       | .
       | 
       | .
       | 
       | .
       | 
       | .
       | 
       | From: How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could
       | chuck wood?
        
         | mechanical_bear wrote:
         | "How much is a jewelry on wood?"
         | 
         | From your derived comments.
        
       | layer8 wrote:
       | Just FYI, it isn't deterministic.
        
       | mwint wrote:
       | "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do
       | eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut
       | enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris
       | nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat." (Latin)
       | 
       | became:
       | 
       | "Lauren est similis, lycopersiciSusceptibility rutrum, sed ego te
       | nocere me et vultus realis. Si liber facile adducere ad accedere
       | nervi ministerium." (Latin)
       | 
       | Doing a final pass manually to English:
       | 
       | "Lauren is like, tomato makeup, but i'm hurting you and you look
       | so real. Bring a book if you can easily access the nerve
       | service."
        
         | mbg721 wrote:
         | Note that the original isn't actual grammatically correct
         | Latin. It's snippets of Cicero that were altered specifically
         | to create meaningless sample text.
        
           | mwint wrote:
           | Indeed, that's why I wanted to see what would come out the
           | other end.
        
         | CSSer wrote:
         | That is oddly poetic.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | irrational wrote:
       | Is it possible to have a machine translation that is so good that
       | you get back the original message after the 10 times? I suppose
       | that might depend on what languages you are translating it into
       | and how closely they map to the starting language.
        
         | frankhorrigan wrote:
         | This is so bizarre. I just wrote a program to do this last
         | week. Precisely the same thing.
         | 
         | I did it with the Google Translate API first, and you can
         | translate it into 100 different languages and back again
         | without ANY data loss whatsoever. My only guess is that they
         | have so check that everything hashes to the same thing? Like
         | some uber-language to check against.
        
       | miloignis wrote:
       | "The sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a
       | dead channel." -> "The dead TV channel was the air on top of
       | color."
       | 
       | Very fun!
        
       | speedylight wrote:
       | "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck" -> "Number of numbers"
       | 
       | I'll concede it's not an easy sentence to make sense of in
       | another language, let alone 10 and back...It does still make me
       | question how much damage has been caused (in the most general
       | sense) due to meaning being lost in translation between people.
       | 
       | In the movie "Arrival"--which is mainly about establishing
       | communication with an extraterrestrial species that visited earth
       | goes fairly in depth into what I consider very realistic
       | challenges and possible methodologies of teaching the aliens our
       | (English) language, and us learning theirs. They even built a
       | rudimentary translator once they had a solid enough
       | understanding. Would highly recommend watching it if you like
       | this kind of content.
       | 
       | Thank you for sharing OP.
        
         | SamBam wrote:
         | That was a great short story.
         | 
         | In contrast, I just read Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir,
         | author of the Martian, and boy is translation between alien
         | languages nice and trivial in that.
        
           | Bedon292 wrote:
           | Isn't a big part of Arrival that the aliens don't experience
           | time the same way we do? Or something along those lines. When
           | something that fundamental is different, that has to become a
           | major hurdle in communication.
           | 
           | Whereas the aliens in Project Hail Mary are still
           | fundamentally similar organisms. And you just have to come up
           | with a common baseline to understand each other. Humans have
           | been able to learn to translate between different languages
           | for a long time now. It seemed no different than that to me.
           | Especially when you add in machine assistance.
           | 
           | I would actually be quite curious though. If you put two
           | people in a room, and each one only speaks one distinct
           | language, and their only goal is to communicate with each
           | other. How long before they can effectively communicate? Now
           | it wouldn't be a perfect comparison because there is likely
           | shared body language. It would still be interesting.
        
             | op00to wrote:
             | Im contractually obligated to mention the novel The Dragons
             | Egg, which followed the interactions between humans and
             | life that evolved on a neutron star. Major time issues in
             | that one. Fun read!
        
             | jfk13 wrote:
             | That would be what's known as "monolingual fieldwork" in
             | linguistic circles.
             | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYpWp7g7XWU
        
             | tomsmeding wrote:
             | > If you put two people in a room, and each one only speaks
             | one distinct language, and their only goal is to
             | communicate with each other. How long before they can
             | effectively communicate?
             | 
             | I would sign up for that even, maybe. I think the main
             | problem with that idea is that willingness to spend time in
             | such an endeavour is highly positively correlated with
             | knowledge of certain well-spread Indo-European languages.
             | ;)
        
             | jacobolus wrote:
             | > _If you put two people in a room, and each one only
             | speaks one distinct language, and their only goal is to
             | communicate with each other. How long before they can
             | effectively communicate?_
             | 
             | They can (somewhat) effectively communicate right from the
             | start, and third party observers who speak neither language
             | can mostly follow along too. Demo:
             | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3qqYyQC9ww
        
             | Octoth0rpe wrote:
             | > Isn't a big part of Arrival that the aliens don't
             | experience time the same way we do? Or something along
             | those lines.
             | 
             | Yes, but an important detail in the plot (possibly a
             | spoiler) is that they experience time differently _because_
             | of the structure of their language, sort of an extreme
             | outcome of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. A human learning
             | their language will eventually experience time in the same
             | way. Notably this is the pattern used by most of the
             | stories in the collection that Arrival was derived from
             | (Stories of your life and others). The author takes a
             | phrase, hypothesis, etc and creates a story out of an
             | extreme and concretized outcome from it. All of the stories
             | in the collection are well worth reading IMO.
        
       | sva_ wrote:
       | It turned "Hitler was a right-wing extremist" into "Hitler is
       | great". On 2nd try: "Hitler was incorrect and balanced". 3rd:
       | "Hitler is a good thing"
        
       | aurora72 wrote:
       | Doesn't work on Firefox 68.
        
         | Markoff wrote:
         | Result:
         | 
         | Firefox is not 66 years.
         | 
         | That's interesting change going from 68 to 66.
        
         | chanandler_bong wrote:
         | Firefox 68? That's so old the code is half Aramaic...
        
           | sophacles wrote:
           | Speaking of Aramaic - there was a translation of Smashmouth's
           | all-star to aramaic and back again floating around a few
           | years ago: https://nerdist.com/article/translated-aramaic-
           | english-smash...
        
             | chanandler_bong wrote:
             | Wow... that really is some good poetry. Thanks for sharing.
        
           | aurora72 wrote:
           | It's one of the latest really private versions, it doesn't
           | try to connect to tens of various websites under the shitto
           | "your security & privacy is of paramount importance to us"
           | and works with %99 of the websites. The %1 websites aren't
           | essential or worth visiting anyway. So whether its code is
           | Aramaic or Lateinic, it's good.
        
         | true_repairman wrote:
         | Firefox is not used in 68.
        
           | aurora72 wrote:
           | Whether it's used commonly or not, it's one the latest
           | versions which don't interfere with your privacy and it works
           | with %99+ of the websites. The %1- sites which don't work,
           | aren't essential or worth visiting, so I'm fine with it :)
        
         | faebi wrote:
         | You should consider upgrading your Firefox version by 40%.
        
           | aurora72 wrote:
           | It works with %99 of the websites. Besides it's one of the
           | latest versions that don't undermine your privacy.
        
         | Semaphor wrote:
         | That's a 3-year-old version, long out of support...
        
           | toper-centage wrote:
           | Version 68 is the last one that supports CPU over-heating
           | when holding down the spacebar, and it's fundamental to some
           | people's workflow in emacs.
        
             | fsflover wrote:
             | (Reference to https://xkcd.com/1172/)
        
       | unavoidable wrote:
       | "To be or not to be, that is the question." -> "Or not."
       | 
       | That settles it then.
        
         | V1ndaar wrote:
         | Haha, tried the same and got:
         | 
         | "Even if this is a problem."
        
           | od14 wrote:
           | I got: "The question is different"
           | 
           | I can't stop laughing, this is treasure
        
             | stordoff wrote:
             | "To be or not to be, that is the question." -> "No
             | questions."
        
       | donatj wrote:
       | I had a Yahoo! Pipe back in the day to do this exactly this with
       | Babelfish against RSS feeds.
        
       | ruckus_one wrote:
       | `I struggle with brain farts. -> Sorry for the brain disorder.`
       | 
       | This cannot be a coincidence. I feel like the author has spoken.
        
       | drcongo wrote:
       | I love this.
       | 
       | > There once was a man from Nantucket
       | 
       | > Who carried his balls in a bucket
       | 
       | Became...
       | 
       | > Once the man was a man
       | 
       | > Take the ball to the pan
       | 
       | I love that it still rhymes.
        
       | ibudiallo wrote:
       | "My name is Ibrahim" -> "My name is Abraham"
       | 
       | This is exactly what happens when I tell people my name in the
       | US. At least, now I know that Americans are deca-lingual.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | vericiab wrote:
       | The languages it gets translated to aren't deterministic so I put
       | the same sentence in 10 times. I was curious if a simple
       | statement that has a conceptual equivalent in many cultures would
       | tend to survive relatively unscathed so each time started with "I
       | made a cup of tea".
       | 
       | 1. "I made a cup of tea"
       | 
       | 2. "I work a tree cup"
       | 
       | 3. "I have prepared a cup of tea."
       | 
       | 4. "I made a cup"
       | 
       | 5. "I make a cup of tea"
       | 
       | 6. "I made a cuppa."
       | 
       | 7. "I prepared a cup of tea"
       | 
       | 8. "Tea"
       | 
       | 9. "I made a cup of tea"
       | 
       | 10. "I have a cup of tea."
       | 
       | Better than I expected really. I'm kind of impressed that it
       | veered into slang on the sixth try and still retained the
       | original meaning.
        
         | vericiab wrote:
         | Five tests of "I made a pot of tea" on the other hand were far
         | less successful.
         | 
         | 1. "I have made a teaspoon"
         | 
         | 2. "I lived in a stain"
         | 
         | 3. "I'm drinking tea"
         | 
         | 4. "I have made a single potential"
         | 
         | 5. "I made a basket"
        
       | adrianh wrote:
       | This was done 10+ years ago by Translation Party
       | (https://www.translationparty.com/), though they simply converted
       | between English and Japanese.
        
         | Grustaf wrote:
         | Going to Japanese and back is probably more effective than
         | passing through 10 Indo-European languages as I think it did
         | for me, all the ones I remember were at least IE. The sentence
         | came with exactly the same meaning.
        
         | bklaasen wrote:
         | Twenty years ago I was in Japan, as an onsite tester while we
         | tried out this new thing called XP. The project wasn't going
         | smoothly because no one had told our Japanese clients we were
         | building the solution iteratively, with their input.
         | 
         | At one stage, we all received an email, in Japanese, from the
         | project stakeholder. I put it through machine translation,
         | which back then was pretty raw. The English text was largely
         | gobbledygook, except for one sentence, still branded in my
         | brain: "It becomes the alligator."
         | 
         | Summed up the project perfectly.
        
           | dr_orpheus wrote:
           | Well putting "It becomes the alligator" through the 10
           | languages (don't know if any were actually Japanese) I got
           | "Occurs with this technician" which seems like something that
           | you could put in any project input.
           | 
           | I really wish there was a history function with a translation
           | back to English at each stage. I would be curious to see if
           | you could identify at what language change "Alligator" became
           | "Technician"
        
       | rapnie wrote:
       | Capitalist greed is destroying our planet --> Rewards for world
       | assistance.
       | 
       | Hmm.
        
       | philipov wrote:
       | back in the IRC days, this was called a babel loop, because the
       | bot we had to do this used the Babel Fish translation engine.
        
       | bovermyer wrote:
       | "My name is Ben and I am a computer programmer" => "I'm so nice,
       | it's a computer."
       | 
       | I enjoy this too much.
        
       | bmmayer1 wrote:
       | "He doesn't like her, but she likes him" ==> "As a person but you
       | love"
        
       | teeray wrote:
       | Lyrics are gold through this thing:
       | 
       | So a story about, My life is going on I want to make minutes and
       | want to be there, I am telling you, I'm in the city and bathe in
       | the city.
       | 
       | Born from Western Hiladelphia Because I have the biggest days in
       | the game.
        
       | abofh wrote:
       | Hi santo
        
       | TuringTest wrote:
       | _English pangrams:_
       | 
       | The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog -> Fox is expected to
       | become Fox's knowledge
       | 
       | The five boxing wizards jump quickly -> Scientists were quickly
       | thrown.
       | 
       | Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs. -> Put five wine calls
       | in my box and release.
       | 
       | Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow -> Quartz black crane
       | support, my marriage broke
       | 
       | ---
       | 
       |  _Spanish pangrams (translated to English after the final step):_
       | 
       | Young man poisoned with whiskey, what a figure you display! ->
       | The young man who nurtures murder is his fire!
       | 
       | Jose bought an old panpipe in Peru. Excusing herself, Sofia threw
       | her whiskey down the sidewalk drain. -> Buy a glitter in juice in
       | Peru. Sofia Sophia asked Sufia.
       | 
       | The swift Indian bat was happily eating thistle and kiwi. The
       | stork played the saxophone behind the straw palenque. -> Fast
       | Indian on Wali and Kiwi. After the saxophone, Somka played the
       | balconies.
       | 
       | Benjamin ordered a kiwi and strawberry drink. Noah, shamelessly,
       | the most exquisite champagne on the menu. -> Enlie someone asked
       | to get rid of the events and stress. Noah's knife, Noah, leaving
       | them and led them to leave.
        
         | SubiculumCode wrote:
         | The thing is, no grammar even has to be involved in this.
         | 
         | "Tree" returned "Enjoyable"
        
         | elpool2 wrote:
         | I also tried "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" but
         | I got back "The brown fox raped the dog quickly".
        
         | Jeff_Brown wrote:
         | I wonder why the result so often repeats a word that isn't
         | repeated (if it appears at all) in the original.
        
           | dr_orpheus wrote:
           | Looking at others results on here it seems to be relatively
           | common for this to happen.
           | 
           | For example I did "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy
           | dog" > "The fastest dog is the fastest dog"
        
             | FatalLogic wrote:
             | It might be caused by words that are compounded from two
             | words that now have similar meanings, such as Wolfhound or
             | Taxicab? Those words could sometimes get translated to two
             | separate words in another language
             | 
             | For instance, Google Translate from English to Chinese and
             | back to English does wolfhound > Lang Gou  > "wolf dog"
        
       | godot wrote:
       | I took a Stripe marketing email that just landed in my inbox to
       | test this out:
       | 
       | "How to stay competitive by building ecosystems of connected
       | experiences that reward loyalty The power of localized payment
       | methods to boost global revenue growth Whether recent crypto
       | growth is sustainable or even warranted"
       | 
       | Kinda amusing how much shorter the final translation is:
       | 
       | "The environment that surrounds the environment? The status of
       | international funding development Don't last"
        
         | dr_orpheus wrote:
         | Oh, translating marketing gobbledygook sounds fun!
         | 
         | From a recent presentation I received: "Accelerate delivery of
         | new systems 'at the speed of need'. Paired with rapid
         | capability acquisition approaches. Enable open architectures
         | that promote modularity and adaptability. Pivot to
         | better/different solutions to respond to evolving threats, new
         | tech"
         | 
         | Ended up as
         | 
         | "Please note the new Speed computer. The boy has a quick path.
         | Change open lists, remove true and true. It is best to want
         | better than more than more than more than more than more than
         | more"
         | 
         | I love the repetitive loop its get stuck in. Not sure how that
         | happened. I also think "Please note the new Speed computer"
         | should be the marketing phrase every time someone releases a
         | new CPU.
        
       | chanandler_bong wrote:
       | Shall we play a game? Guess the original song based on the
       | translation:
       | 
       | To the ventilation of the gas ventilation in the ventilation
       | 
       | A warm odor of jam, wind
       | 
       | I saw a bright light before the front
       | 
       | The weight of my head and check
       | 
       | I had to let me get at night.
       | 
       | He stood at the door.
       | 
       | I heard an accredited work
       | 
       | I think that
       | 
       | "Time or hell".
       | 
       | And transmit the light that takes
       | 
       | to continue
       | 
       | I think he heard his story.
        
         | zorr wrote:
         | breathe, warm, light, story etc make me think of something by
         | Pearl Jam, Bush or Fleetwood Mac but honestly I have no clue.
        
           | chanandler_bong wrote:
           | Fleetwood Mac was close-ish...
        
         | iglio wrote:
         | Hotel California?
        
           | chanandler_bong wrote:
           | Ding!
        
         | kretaceous wrote:
         | Hotel California by the Eagles
        
           | chanandler_bong wrote:
           | Ding!
        
         | yodon wrote:
         | Not sure if others had this experience but by a few lines into
         | the text I was hearing these words sung to the tune of hotel
         | california while reading them.
         | 
         | My conscious had zero awareness of what was going on, but my
         | subconscious got it immediately.
        
           | op00to wrote:
           | Exactly same experience.
        
           | renewiltord wrote:
           | Bizarrely, same! I actually thought I was getting it wrong
           | but was like "Damn, too bad this stuck in my head" haha!
        
           | drexlspivey wrote:
           | It's arguably the most famous song of all time so not that
           | suprising imo.
        
             | mbg721 wrote:
             | That's an interesting claim, but it's plausible. I would
             | have thought "Happy Birthday" or some Beatles song. Is
             | there a list of most recognized songs someplace?
        
           | andrelaszlo wrote:
           | I had the exact same thing. Started humming it but it made no
           | sense,so I thought "nah, probably some new song that I don't
           | know". Interesting!
        
         | dkarl wrote:
         | Can you guess my theme?
         | 
         | "You want to destroy your enemies, look at them before sadness
         | of sadness from a woman."
         | 
         | "Do you remember when you decide the meeting? I lun."
         | 
         | "It's not a mood!"
         | 
         | "Back."
        
           | camtarn wrote:
           | Schwarzenegger films? Don't recognise the middle two, but the
           | first one is obviously Conan and the last one is presumably
           | Terminator?
        
             | dkarl wrote:
             | Yep! The middle two are, "Do you remember when I promised
             | to kill you last? I lied," and "It's not a tumor!"
             | 
             | Other catchphrases:
             | 
             | "Get to the chopper!" ended up as, "Get ten people."
             | 
             | "Let off some steam, Bennet," ended up as, "Free steam,
             | release Bennett."
             | 
             | "Hasta la vista, baby," ended up as "Hasta La Vista Kids."
             | The engine correctly identified "hasta la vista" as not
             | being in the native language and left it alone at every
             | step, except that it got transliterated for some languages
             | (but not all!) and ended up capitalized in the end.
        
       | fallingfrog wrote:
       | I'm really enjoying torturing this service with bizarre phrases..
       | 
       | "I have tarried too long in the garden of plenty, and now my
       | waistcoat is too small to successfully encircle my girthy frame."
       | -> "I have often had the opportunity to spend time with time, and
       | now there is a small hip for success."
        
       | stolenmerch wrote:
       | "A long descriptive name is better than a short enigmatic name. A
       | long descriptive name is better than a long descriptive comment."
       | 
       | "The reported name is longer than a mysterious name and a short
       | debt explanation is better than long-term interpretation."
        
       | SubiculumCode wrote:
       | "I am a rich woman" returned "I am to be married." "I am rich" "I
       | am fair" and "I am a rich person." Only after a dozen iterations
       | did it come back correctly.
        
       | koreth1 wrote:
       | "Be excellent to each other." -> "It may be better to be
       | different."
        
       | nicgrev103 wrote:
       | 'We come in peace' becomes 'We are in the room' reminds me of the
       | movie 'Arrival' about trying to communicate with aliens and the
       | linguistic difficulties.
        
       | was_a_dev wrote:
       | "Hello" -> "Good night!"
       | 
       | Interesting to see a simple word and meaning flipped on its head.
       | It even gained an explaination mark!
       | 
       | It'd be great if we could see all 10 translations matched
       | alongside English to see how it devolves per translation.
        
         | vulcan01 wrote:
         | I assume in one of the steps, "Hello" was translated into a
         | word that was for both greeting and farewell (such as "ciao" in
         | Italian) and then the next step translated it into the
         | farewell.
        
         | robbedpeter wrote:
         | No offense intended, but it's "exclamation mark" - it's a
         | common mistake.
        
           | was_a_dev wrote:
           | None taken, you are correct after all.
           | 
           | And thank you, I was looking at it wondering why it didn't
           | look or sound _quiet right_ , I just didn't catch it.
        
       | platelminto wrote:
       | One of my favourite ever YouTube channels, that sadly isn't
       | around anymore, explored this concept with the 'Fresh Prince of
       | Bel-Air' theme song. If anyone's interested check CDZA out!
       | 
       | https://youtu.be/LMkJuDVJdTw
        
         | TonyTrapp wrote:
         | Hah! That was my first thought as well when I read the
         | headline. Classic video!
        
       | wycy wrote:
       | "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
       | created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with
       | certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty
       | and the pursuit of Happiness." -> "We are forced to produce these
       | rights and all people are included and create our ordinary Rights
       | of Freedom and Happiness."
        
         | TuringTest wrote:
         | I like the translated version better
        
         | kps wrote:
         | I got, "All people are equal and their Creator, freedom, and
         | happiness, happiness and happiness", which is... happier.
        
       | akmittal wrote:
       | `Great to see you -> Mouth`
       | 
       | And I thought translation is so good these days
        
         | ithkuil wrote:
         | Context matters. If you don't have context you can't translate
         | faithfully.
         | 
         | Some expressions have multiple meanings.
         | 
         | Humans do a very good job guessing the most likely meaning, but
         | the main metric of what constitutes the most likely meaning is
         | the context. The other metric is which meaning is the most
         | common. But humans can disagree about what they think is most
         | common/reasonable.
         | 
         | The shorter the text, the less internal context, the more
         | opportunities for drift.
         | 
         | For example consider the full sentence:
         | 
         | > The farmer allows walkers to cross the field for free, but
         | the bull charges.
         | 
         | Here it's clear it's a word play on the multiple meanings of
         | the verb "to charge" and a human translator can decide to
         | traduce it correctly but losing the word play or to just give
         | up or invent an equivalent word play.
         | 
         | But in isolation "the bull charges" is likely to be interpreted
         | as the bull is going to hit you with its horns, rather than it
         | will require you to give it some money.
         | 
         | Now, you just have to find a word that behaves this way one the
         | way back to English, which gets more and more likely the more
         | languages you use in the chain.
        
           | oneeyedpigeon wrote:
           | In this case, shouldn't a translator give me both options?
           | E.g. it should translate both "the bull attacks" and "the
           | bull requires payment". If it can find a single word with
           | both meanings in the target language, use that. Otherwise,
           | return multiple options -- a UI could allow the user to
           | choose, presenting the meaning of each translation alongside
           | it.
        
             | numpad0 wrote:
             | > the bull requires payment
             | 
             | Is the bull the one requiring or being required the
             | payment? Or is bull used as a noun or a verb - I mean it's
             | just too ambiguous to do anything with, and some ambiguity
             | is hard to even notice without a context. Though, "the bull
             | charges" is worse; it can't even be determined whether it's
             | first or second person interaction, so "the bull requires"
             | is definitely a clarification.
        
       | bwanab wrote:
       | This probably is going a little too far, but:
       | 
       | "Since the introduction of the special principle of relativity
       | has been justified, every intellect which strives after
       | generalisation must feel the temptation to venture the step
       | towards the general principle of relativity. But a simple and
       | apparently quite reliable consideration seems to suggest that,
       | for the present at any rate, there is little hope of success in
       | such an attempt;"
       | 
       | Excerpt From Relativity : the Special and General Theory Albert
       | Einstein
       | 
       | Becomes:
       | 
       | If you have a unique ideology, you need to see everything known
       | in a simple light. But for these skills to succeed, you can trust
       | the activity easily and cleanly.
        
       | SCUSKU wrote:
       | The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a
       | disaster for the human race -(3 iterations)-> Be a man with a
       | dangerous daughter.
       | 
       | That's one way to deal with it!
        
       | degun wrote:
       | Is your mother's health better now? -> Is it? Is your health
       | good?
        
       | degun wrote:
       | I am. --> I want to be.
        
         | wycy wrote:
         | To be, or want to be. That is the question.
        
         | drewzero1 wrote:
         | To be or not to be --> According to Noah
        
       | postalrat wrote:
       | My house is a mess. -> My house is fine.
        
       | arcticbull wrote:
       | A popular YouTuber, Brandon Farris, has a whole playlist of
       | recipes ostensibly having been run through the a similar process
       | and then followed literally. Certainly worth a couple of laughs.
       | For instance, [edit](chocolate souffle). [1]
       | 
       | [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar6_0KYmDLg
        
       | anonymousisme wrote:
       | This is a terrific example of the game of "telephone", but
       | achieves the result through multiple language translations
       | instead of multiple phrase interpretations in the same language.
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers
        
       | stordoff wrote:
       | I tried a few random political slogans that came to mind.
       | 
       | "Brexit means Brexit" -> "Brotherhood is the collapse"
       | 
       | "Make America Great Again" -> "Renovate"
       | 
       | "For the Many, not the Few" -> "There is no man"
       | 
       | "Build Back Better" -> "This is good"
       | 
       | "Change We Can Believe In" -> "We can be confident"
       | 
       | "Because Britain Deserves Better" -> "Because the UK is useful"
        
       | fallingfrog wrote:
       | "Please accept this rabid fruit bat as a gesture of the degree of
       | respect I have for you and your colleagues."
       | 
       | ->
       | 
       | "Here's. Receive battery life as a size of respect to you and
       | your peers."
       | 
       | "When at last I become king, rest assured that you and all of
       | your dastardly co-conspirators will be the first against the
       | wall."
       | 
       | ->
       | 
       | "I think I am king, we hope all the authors are doing at work."
        
       | Markoff wrote:
       | Hi, what's your name? -> Hey! What's your name?
       | 
       | In Slovak going from friendly to rude.
       | 
       | What's today for lunch? -> What's the food condition now?
       | 
       | That changed completely.
       | 
       | I wish you could just choose the languages (with random option)
       | on one screen and translate them all at same time with end result
       | instead clicking through.
        
       | dkarl wrote:
       | "Your mother is a lovely human being." -> "Your mother is a good
       | person."
       | 
       | Not bad. I like the idea that this one translates pretty easily
       | between many languages.
        
       | mnorris wrote:
       | I used this to create a short poem after I noticed that all of
       | the imperfections of translation accumulate across translations
       | but the output was thematically similar to the input.
       | 
       | The odd-numbered lines are sentences I wrote, and the even-
       | numbered lines are sentences from the model. Then I came up with
       | a sentence that would continue the previous sentence.
       | 
       | input: Nothing can break my spirit;
       | 
       | output: I couldn't do anything
       | 
       | input: Because I was lifeless.
       | 
       | output: Why don't you live?
       | 
       | input: Enter into eternal communion with the human species;
       | 
       | output: Forever with such a person.
       | 
       | input: I am the link between my ancestors and my descendants,
       | 
       | output: I am a good relationship between my visitors and
       | disregard.
        
       | ant6n wrote:
       | "To repair the joint, one has to oil the ball bearings" -> "To
       | the spherical tank must be oil to restore the connection"
        
       | missedthecue wrote:
       | I wonder what would happen if you separately hired ten
       | professional translators and fed them an example sentence until
       | you got it back in English.
        
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       (page generated 2022-04-27 23:01 UTC)