Bruce writes:

> I passed the first paragraph through the Babelizer at 
>  http://www.tashian.com/multibabel/ which translates the text back and 
forth 
>  from English into French to English to German to English to Italian to 
>  English to Spanish to English to Portuguese and finally back to English.

There is a forty year-old story from the first days of artificial 
intelligence work, where people had just developed an English-to-Russian and 
Russian-to-English translating program. One of the first sentences that they tried was:

     "Out of sight, out of mind."

After they fed the English sentence into the machine and it was translated 
into Russian, they took the output and fed it back into the reverse translator, 
which caused it to reappear as:

     "Invisible and insane." *

Wirt Atmar

* I don't think the story actually has any basis in fact. It just made an 
excellent allegory/parable/joke describing how difficult the translation process 
is.

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *