Comments on: More Babbling

By: humorix

humorix — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 07:14:31 +0000

And still there, I do not speak about ” short scales(ladders) ” and about ” long scales(ladders) “, about kilometres, about miles, about squared feet, about cubic thumbs, etc.!! Ha! Ha!
Et encore lÃ , je ne parle pas des “Ã©chelles courtes” et des “Ã©chelles longues”, des kilomÃ¨tres, miles, des pieds carrÃ©s, pouces cubes, etc !! ha ! ha !
Traduction “Reverso” !

By: Deen

Deen — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 19:31:34 +0000

This was the basis of a fictional game that the main character would play in Philip K. Dick's 1969 novel Galactic pot-healer. You'd take a book title, take it through several translation machines in several languages, and back to English. The results were given to the other players, who'd have to guess what the original title was. I'm sure you can guess what book is "On rye, fish". I used Google translator, English -> German -> French -> Japanese -> English, if you want to check for yourself.

By: NewEnglandBob

NewEnglandBob — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 18:30:34 +0000

Since I had never heard the term idiolect, I looked it up.

“An idiolect is a variety of a language unique to an individual.”

Therefore “my native idiolect” is redundant.

/pedantry

By: Interrobang

Interrobang — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 18:20:41 +0000

I’ve never actually done that; I don’t use machine translation except where I’m looking up a word I don’t know in a language I already do. I understand the results can be…humourous at times, but it just kind of underscores for me that machine translation isn’t, as they say in my native idiolect, ready for prime time. 😀