[cdhostage]

The Babelizer is a silly little program that accepts some text and sends it to AltaVista's Babelfish service, a literal translation tool. The fun begins when it translate the translation, and repeats until it gets two of the same answers. The most fun comes not from poetry, where subtle shadings make retranslation ridiculous (you kind of expect that). Instead, it comes from innocuous phrases that shouldn't pose any trouble.

Recently, Versiontracker showed a new version of the program, and I tried it out again. It's fun for about ten minutes, then you forget about it. You can havfe more fun with the modern version if you have all the extra fonts installed, so that Japanese and Greek characters display correctly. Except that I found a phrase that locked it into a loop, producing ever-longer and more convoluted strings.

The phrase was "Bob Dole wants to be President" flipping with Japanese. It went for fifty translations before I told it to stop. The last one had only "to" and "be" in common with my input.

Please find some other phrases that make Babelizer choke.

[d4nth3m4n]

i thought there would be babes in this thread.

[awaspaas]

"Bob Dole wants to be president" --> "Or, when thinking in regard to meaning, concerning Tsuga 1 really you devised the method of in the opposite direction side pointing the thing of the time when it is measured, in regard to the president and the human regarding the edge 1 that time in 1 when 1 1 1 o'clock the time being measured whether is, in regard to the possibility management pulling of consideration how, how, in regard to the place regarding the wind gear device because of of that of type 1 hour of 1 in regard to 1 of possible 1 of 1 in regard to that as for pointing abnormally with the front part and the point which reach to the time point when it is something, so, either one opportunity which becomes as for In order, it considers it is measured thing that it is considered, that it is, storage time of fact 1 of the time when it reaches in order 1, assembly that it is desirable is considered, to measure one hour 1 1 is measured. Simultaneous Chubu of the conviction of of sharp of standard hour 1 hour is old."

[MilkmanDan]

This is why Japanese sucks so much.

[wataru]

Originally posted by MilkmanDan:
This is why Japanese sucks so much.

I'm sure that was in jest, but I'll bite: It has nothing to do with Japanese, and everything to do with machine translation.

I tried "Bob Dole wants to be president" and my results didn't match the above at all. The first Japanese translation was almost perfect, and of course things degenerate quickly from there.

It looks like the J-to-E system is much worse than E-to-J: It screwed up a simple sentence like 「私は大統領になりたいと思う」, giving the result "I think that would like to become the president." The problem here is that a machine can't tell when or when not to translate 思う, which is literally "to think," but in this case is not necessary in English. It also can't figure out (because it's only implied in the Japanese) that the subject "I" applies to both verbs ("to become" and "to think"), so that's why "I" is missing from the translation. Without the "I," the English is malformed and of course it can't correctly translate further.

[MaxPower2k3]

I tried "The cedar in the hamster cage is getting low." (first thing i thought of, for some reason.)

I stopped it after about 20 times, at which point it had:

The Himalayan Himalayan Himalayan Himalayan Himalayan Himalayan Himalayan Himalayan Himalayan Himalayan Himalayan Himalayan Himalayan Himalayan Himalayan Himalayan Himalayan cedar became low at the time of the hamster.

That was Japanese > English.

hm.

[wataru]

That's because they translated "cedar" as "himalaya sugi." A sugi is a Japanese cedar, which then gets translated back as "cedar." So "cedar" -> "himalaya sugi" -> "Himalayan cedar" -> "himalaya himalaya sugi" -> "Himalayan Himalayan cedar" and so on.