March 10, 2003

My new web toy

The simplest things make me happy. If you'll look over to the left and down, you'll see my new translation toy. (You can get one of your own here.) I usually eschew things from other servers -- I've had the Weather Pixie, the Amazon.com donate thing, the Blogchalking thing, and so on, and they all at one time or another cacked up my page when their server went down. I am sure that this little program will be no different, but for as long as I can stand it, enjoy. Here are the results for Chinese (I make no guarantee as to the coherency of the actual results, since I neither read nor speak Chinese; I just think it's kinda neat) -- click for larger:

Update: of course, it will not translate the gif images that I use as drop-caps, so some coherency is lost there.

Posted by Andrea Harris at March 10, 2003 01:00 AM
Comments

Sometime when you have a lot of important things to do and absolutely no interest in doing any of them, try having Babelfish translate something from English to French to German to Spanish and then back to English again. Where this falls apart is anything Chomsky wrote; it comes out actually making more sense than it did going in.

Posted by: David Perron at March 10, 2003 at 08:59 AM

Translating your page into Chinese yields a peculiarly evocative text:

Grr-animaux!

????????? ????????????????urther ???: ?????? Gaultier ????????(???????Madonna ?pointy ? ??bra ????, ??? ?? ) PETA ??? ???????????????????????? ? ???????????? ?

????????, ???????????????? ?????????derrieres ??????????????? ????????Saddam Hussein ?????????? tackiness

Posted by: Don at March 10, 2003 at 03:35 PM

Maybe it will get me banned in China.

Posted by: Andrea Harris at March 10, 2003 at 03:58 PM

Yes, they frown on too many questions. Too many question marks probably gets extra-large frowns.

Posted by: David Perron at March 11, 2003 at 11:36 AM