[news.admin.net-abuse.email] Re: Loneliness .sig Xlations [Was: Re: A message from PSI...]

[Stephan Lehmke]

Subject: Re: Loneliness .sig Xlations [Was: Re: A message from PSI...]
From: jtho...@mason2.gmu.edu (John E Thomason)
Newsgroups: news.admin.net-abuse.email

Andrew Gambier <and...@gambier.demon.co.uk> writes:

>OK. Secret's out.
>http://babelfish.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/translate?

Hey! This altavista translator thing is pretty slick! There is
a minor problem with convergence, that is..if you feed it back
the translation, you will often get something different, which you can
then feed back and retranslate, over and over, until it converges.
In the example below, Altavista identified another Congressional scandal.

Example (English to German to English to German, etc.):

"I hate spam, and I want Congress to make it illegal."

Altavista says:

"Ich hasse Spam und ich wuensche Kongress es ungueltig bilden."
(umlauts and double s are ascii-ized here, but not on altavista)

If you feed the original (with umlauts, etc.) german back into altavista,
you get:

"I hate Spam and I require congress it invalidly form."

which translates to:

"Ich hasse Spam und ich benoetige Kongress es unzulaessig Formular."

from which you get:

"I hate Spam and I need congress it illegally form."

then to:

"Ich hasse Spam und ich benoetige Kongress, den es sich illegal bildet."

which finally converges to:

"I hate Spam and I need congress, which it educates itself illegaly."

If you try to translate that into German and back into English,
you get the same thing. What is Congress up to, now?

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