Message Forum: Re: Babelfish

Re: Babelfish

Posted By: Sam, on host 12.16.110.5
Date: Thursday, October 8, 1998, at 12:12:54
In Reply To: Babelfish posted by Stephen on Thursday, October 8, 1998, at 12:08:44:

> Bad translations can only remind me of one thing: AltaVista's Babelfish. While based off of the psychic fish from the Hitchiker's books, well, this one isn't quite so good. It's sort of like a Dialectizer that's not meant to be funny. You can go ahead and translate text or web pages from English into like French, German, Italian or Spanish. And from any of those languages back into English. What's so funny about this is that you get the weirdest results. I urge you all to go try translating some English text, and then taking the translation they give you and translating it back. Some weird stuff.

Definitely. I tried this some time ago and meant
to mention it in the Site Journal. I translated
a lot of RinkWorks stuff in it. The main page
mentions "Pinball Wizards" in the description for
the Apogee FAQ. My favorite babelfish translation
is to put that through a English-French-English
translation. It comes back "Magicians of Flipper."

Replies To This Message

I hereby Babel you! (Eng->Fr->Eng->It->Eng) - John W. - Fri, 10/9/1998, 11:27:11
- Re: I hereby Babel you! (Eng->Fr->Eng->It->Eng) - Stephen - Fri, 10/9/1998, 21:34:46
  - Re: I hereby Babel you! (Eng->Fr->Eng->It->Eng) - Silon - Sat, 7/28/2001, 10:32:46
  - Re: I hereby Babel you! (Eng->Fr->Eng->It->Eng) - Darien - Mon, 10/12/1998, 20:24:36
    - Iterative Babeling (Eng->Fr->Eng->Port->Eng->Spa->Eng) - John W. - Tue, 10/13/1998, 12:33:04