"To cover the gift, I will kiss every morning, these"

[larryhammer]

It's be a while since I've talked about the joys of machine translation. Here's a new toy: Translation Party. It's even better, in its way, than Multibabel.

Despite recent advances, machine translations to and from Japanese remain notoriously unstable: take your output and translate it back, you rarely get back what you started with -- often enough, it's near unrecognizable. So clearly what you need to do is translate your backtranslation again, and keep going until you get a stable backtranslation, in a sort of semantic equilibrium. Or you can let Translation Party do it for you, using Google's translator.

By this way, "Achilles' baneful wrath—resound, O goddess—that imposed Infinite sorrows on the Greeks, and many brave souls lost From breasts heroic" becomes "Achilles is furious harmful - ringing or goddess, and his hero, a brave general from the grief of losing the soul of Greece,"

Large texts often give it trouble: just add a line, "Achilles' baneful wrath—resound, O goddess—that imposed Infinite sorrows on the Greeks, and many brave souls lost From breasts heroic; sent them far, to that invisible cave That no light comforts", and it hangs without terminating at "Achilles' anger toxic - blaring, ö goddess, Greece, and many brave souls, and sent to the cave, the grief of losing a breast of the invisible light, the hero of infinite comfort"

Which is a shame, as this version is clearly much better -- the anger of Achilles is, indeed, toxic.

Then there's "Like the moon in the blue sky I want to embrace transience and reach out my hand", which is already a (human) translation of "Aoi sora no tsuki no youni hakanasa daite te wo nobashitai" -- the party version is "I have to go to access the vulnerability of the authentication from the sky."

Pure poetry.

---L.

Comments

[janni.livejournal.com]

Here's the new, translated and retranslated opening to Bones:

"It is a sister. The baby, her skin is light fairy tale world of transparent glass in front of a moonlit river, the thin, the second night, silver, software, beautiful skin."