| Karl-Erik Tallmo on 14 Nov 2000 01:45:52 -0000 |
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| Re: <nettime> until the text becomes ' produces ' the left sidewith us see... |
wade tillett wrote: >I was wondering how much text degrades as it is put into a translator. As >an experiment, I have entered this text into babelfish and had it >translate from french to english and from english to french until the text >becomes 'stable.' Let's see... > Nice idea, Wade! I did something similar a couple of years ago, translating the famous opening lines of Finnegans wake into French and German and back into English, ending up with the oddly distorted phrasing "riverrun, after the day before and to the Adam's, the version bank for the curve of the drawer", see http://art-bin.com/art/ababele.html ... Coming back from a linguistic tour like that brings to mind the Bradbury story where a guy travels back to pal�ozoic or Jurrassic times, accidentally steps on a butterfly, and back again finds signs and posters oddly misspelt. I guess the idea to translate back and forth until the pendulum stops, makes us end up in a sort of interlinguistic state. Or at least it could be such a thing, if machine translators were really able to parse and not relied as much on word and phrase dictionaries. In the future, maybe we will have a sort of blank language for machines that is not shaped into any natural human language until somebody demands an output. Then, and only then, will it become, English, Spanish, German or Tagalog - spoken or written. Karl-Erik Tallmo _________________________________________________________________ KARL-ERIK TALLMO, Swedish writer, lecturer, and expert on new media. Phone +46 (0)708 24 44 13 Articles and lectures at http://www.nisus.se/archive "From Gorgias to Gore": http://www.nisus.se/gorgias Editor of THE ART BIN at http://art-bin.com Five year anniversary: Max Klinger - Teleteaching 1899 ... _________________________________________________________________ # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [email protected] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]