Lost in Translation automates a process I’ve been doing for fun for a while now: Chaining automatic translations and turning perfectly reasonable English prose into absolute insane gibbering nonsense. Here is a complete run of the service, with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean included (they cause the chain to blow up real good):
Obviously, trimming some of the fat would be a good thing, but I wanted to give a full flavor of the thing in the OP.
And one more:
Indeed.
Oh, man. You don’t even need to use the Chinese, Japanese, or Korean translation programs to blow things up real good.
Here’s the line I picked to translate:
“Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four?”
Just one round of translation–from English into French, and then from French into English, yielded this gem:
“Nevertheless will you need me, will that you nevertheless feed me,
when I am sixty-furnace?”
That line then got fed into a program for translation into German, which then got translated back into English, then put into Italian, then back into English, then into Portuguese, then into English, then into Spanish, and back into English.
The final product says:
“You have the necessity of the temporary one, of which that she lost
herself nevertheless in me, if you were sixty-furnace?”
Hmmm…I’m starting to think that multiple translations into and out of Romance languages (and maybe Germanic ones, too) yield weirder screw-ups than those into and out of Chinese, Japanese, or Korean.
I ran the line, “Take this job and shove it!” through Lost in Translation twice–once without the “Include Chinese, Japanese, and Korean” box checked, and once with that box checked.
With Chinese, Japanese, and Korean included, the final product became:
It receives east work, progress.
That almost, kind of, sort of makes some kind of sense. You could at least see this line in a modern experimental poem.
Without Chinese, Japanese, and Korean included (i.e., using French, Italian, Portuguese, and German), I ended up with:
He makes the examinación of this work and you it hurries above of
them.
That’s not even vaguely parsable.
The zone of the hour is all hand has that the relative who helps of the excess of the country () is good personal weather.
(Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.)
We have taken off that we had ourselves in all the situations, of that
the situation, that you worried equal, he we scared.
(We have nothing to fear but fear itself.)
They appreciate the love, that one that is with you you estimate
directly.
(The love you make is equal to the love you take.)
The account, the one that happened to the forehead, assumed what to
tuemmler that it interests the form given of the extension. "
Excrement of the OH - " The humanity is one.
(Dolphins evolve opposable thumbs. “Oh shit!” says humanity.)
“Ridicule is the only weapon that can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them.”
became
“Which the interest of the updated restorations the games of the expensive outpost is not probably the use suggested in difficult also knows only the arm. It takes through the internal paper before is to flaunter, this one that the idea in the later one interests the transformation relation, he is free obligation.”
I started with the statement:
“If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”
That still makes a certain amount of sense.
But once I ran it through the rest of its paces, I ended up with:
“If that one not transformassero he inside in the selected relative of
the situation, to select to him always decides.”
After running the Hail Mary though the server about 10 times, it came out like this:
“Loftily, this effect, of that with irradiates that this is, of
this, within if it is the form, he, of who it stops to hail the
interest of thee of copies, those of Maria, the woman that he is and
he had a necessity of thousand sufficient materials, that it is to the
artistic client the important good of the general and with which with
the elasticity of the gift, all the tastes without the physical dowry,
of this suggests, he, he, that ours the criminals with nut/mother more
more of the plus, of that this, of where the Christian of modernity,
from this God Santo of Maria and gebaermutter, she comes from, that
thy is of the gift, he arrests itself with us.”