Lost in translation

A fun web toy that takes a phrase of yours and puts it through Babelfish and back - repeatedly.

The fun happy folks at uknot have been having fun with multibabel, so I thought I'd have a go. I started, admittedly, with something that wasn't exactly standard English to begin with, but I didn't expect it to turn out like this:

the UK2 - ferocious PHP/MYSQL/PERL of TODAY and the chemical warfare training AVAILABLE, that one we unloaded of the these our number passed of the employee of table UK2 - USED OF TABLE I GAVE SUPERULTRA - PHP/MYSQL/PERL the opening and it improves its site of the Web in http://uk2.net or buys a new field and the shutdowns were closed he arrives of the beginning. PHP - The language of MySQL - more popular worlds puissants/Perl of the bed of iper of written Praeprozessor the text of the data - language of course practices in extration and of report/ratio and all ridiculous situation * L*O*W * to the PRICES like always.

One of the fun bits about this toy is that it shows you all the stages, so you can work out where the really weird stuff comes from. Sometimes it gets side-tracked right at the start: "the opening" comes from a mistranslation of "login" at the first step. "server" gets translated into "serveur", then back into "waiter", and stays that way until it can't translate "empregado de mesa" back and ends up as "employee of table" / "used of table".

Other words stay unscathed for quite a while. "prepared" is mostly unmolested", until the translation back from Portuguese adds "chemical" by mistake, and the translation back from Spanish turns the same phrase into "chemical warfare training".

If you decide you want to include Chinese, Japanese and Korean as well as European languages, it gets even weirder.

The time they use to us recently of the table of the rows and that the PHP/MYSQL/-UK2 to be affinchè ferocious is possible hour is extensively, we, which it uses the place of branello, of which it gives the form to the prepared UK2 and - this employee of the SUPERULTRA table - to the admission of branello of PHP/MYSQL/ and the HTTP this we regulated fogos,: and of the benefits the category of //uk2.net of a distance that the inclusion, that is to say, has from the game, that must begin pure for you and this one new improvement. Always Praeprozessor of the original one of MySQL of the PHP- language - filling - done of the world of the language of branello of the base of the data power/the, of that very did not evacuate or that that that is report/ratio and or the letter of the method, * L*O*W * you taken to the prisoner the whole price.

The last bit, "LOW you taken to the prisoner the whole price", is especially good. Here's how the successive English versions go:

  • "LOW prices as always"
  • "as always everything of price"
  • "takes always all prices"
  • "very capture all price"
  • "capture all the price very"
  • "you take prisoner the whole price very much"
  • "you take to prisoner the entire price a lot"
  • "you taken to the prisoner the entire price"