In message <[log in to unmask]>, Wirt Atmar 
<[log in to unmask]> writes
>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.

Another useful exercise is to translate the English "I'm mad about my 
flat" into American.

And then to translate the American "I'm made about my flat" into 
English....


-- 
Roy Brown        'Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be
Kelmscott Ltd     useful, or believe to be beautiful'  William Morris

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