Traduction Bidon

I have just added a link in the right margin to the Fagan Finder translation tool which allows readers to translate the blog with two clicks. (Note: it only works if you don't block referrers.) The translation tool covers an amazing number of languages, but like the Babelfish, the translations do leave a little to be desired. Consider this translation into French of the previous item:

Argh. Blogging se développe en culture secondaire avec son propre argot. Non, non, non, qui est pas ce que je veux. Ce n'est pas lycée. Je ne ai pas besoin d'une clique pour rendre me le sentir bon. Je veux participer aux conversations pensives qui fuient dans la sphère publique.

D'autre part, Technorati.COM prétend savoir de 994.254 weblogs (qui devraient frapper million par la semaine prochaine), avec 45.043.270 liens actifs. À plus mauvais, c'est a substantiel culture secondaire.

Mais, l'amusement comme limites aiment “Bleg,” “Blogroach,” “Fisk”, “Idiotarian,” ou “Instapundit” peut être, je ne pensent pas que je vais avoir beaucoup d'utilisation pour la plupart de jargon blogging. J'espère écrire comme prose franche comme je bidon, sujet à la nécessité occasionnelle d'exprimer des idées et la nuance complexes, et naturellement à la privation systémique de sommeil.

Well, the first sentence is great. But the last paragraph is a mess. “J'espère écrire comme prose franche comme je bidon”? I don't think that's quite what I meant.

Reminds me of the old joke about the test for a translation program. Supposedly, during the Cold War there was a lot of research on Russian-English translation for use on the hotline between the White House and the Kremlin. The story goes that the spec called for a program that could take an English phrase, translate it to Russian, then when the output was run through the program again in the reverse direction would translate it back into the original English. So the engineers came up with a prototype, and input their test phrase: “Out of sight, out of mind” and got back some Russian. When they input the Russian, they got back “Blind drunk”.

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3 Responses to Traduction Bidon

  1. s. a. zoo says:

    i checked croatian and serbian…omg what awfull unreadable gibberish…not at all helpful. a joke really.

  2. I’m glad you’ve made use of my translation tool, but you should note one thing. As it says on http://www.faganfinder.com/translate/info.php, the translator uses *other* translators, including Systran (which powers AltaVista’s Babelfish).

    The Croatian and Serbian are powered by InterTran, which admittely has quite poor abilities.

  3. Mohammad amin says:

    thyroid sport

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