Translation Party is a website built using Google Translate. The idea is to take an English sentence, translate into Japanese, then back into English, and keep going back and forth until an equilibrium is reached and the translation stabilizes.
I tried out various different sentences. Here’s what I got for “China and Japan will never get along“:
I knew Google’s motto is “don’t be evil,” but I didn’t expect that to result in translations that lecture (politely). Still, pretty cool.
Anyway, I recommend you play around with Translation Party. It’s a very simple concept; would love to see it done in more language combinations (especially Chinese to English!).
Well, if we apply “Don’t be evil” to “Translation with a conscience”, surely we come up with “Don’t deliberately mistranslate”, in which case, we find Google falling a little short of its slogan’s full implications. And not for the first time.
August 8th, 2009 at 3:44 pm“This economy is really going into the toilet.”
becomes…
“I’m actually in the current economic situation, go to the bathroom.”
August 8th, 2009 at 4:57 pmThat’s interesting… I put in “I’ve got half a mind to confiscate my son’s wheelchair” (don’t ask… it’s supposed to be strange, isn’t it).
it translates to “私は自分の息子の車椅子を押収するために30の心を持っている”, which in turn is “I seized a wheelchair for my son has a heart of 30″. As you can see, the 30 is present in the first Japanese translation. Anyone know where that came from? There’s nothing like 30 in the original sentence..
August 8th, 2009 at 6:51 pmBen,
Hmmm, that is bizarre. I tried “I’ve got half a mind to…” on some other sentences (this one was amusing), and got no 30 in the results.
My guess is that somehow Google Translate thought time was involved. 30 is half the number of minutes in an hour, or seconds in a minute. That’s all I got…
August 8th, 2009 at 8:18 pmHave you tried running the same sentence back & forth through Chinese & English?
August 8th, 2009 at 9:58 pmHaha, that’s good… I tried some more and didn’t get any closer to the 30 mystery, but I did find an indefinite loop… http://translationparty.com/tp/#632159
August 8th, 2009 at 11:27 pmHmm, I tried “He’s on his deathbed” and it became “He died for me.”
August 9th, 2009 at 12:40 amAs suggested by Tim P, I tried hosting a “party” manually. Google Translate even has a feature where you can swap the direction of translation with a single click, so it’s pretty easy. With English and Chinese, it reached equilibrium even sooner than Japanese:
Han and Uygur will never get along. 汉族和维吾尔族将永远和睦相处。 Han and Uygur will always live in harmony. 汉族和维吾尔族将永远和睦相处。 Han and Uygur will always live in harmony.
I also tried starting with Chinese instead of English:
汉族和维吾尔族将永远相处不好。 Han and Uygur will never get along well. 汉族和维吾尔族将永远和睦相处。 Han and Uygur will always live in harmony. 汉族和维吾尔族将永远和睦相处。 Han and Uygur will always live in harmony.
Machine translation still has such a long way to go.
August 9th, 2009 at 9:20 amIt is really funny. “The glass is on the table” (note the lack of period) is translated into Japanese just fine, but then turns into a question on the way back into English – for no apparent reason. Then it ends up as “glass table”.
http://translationparty.com/tp/#765555
Add a period to the end of the sentence, and it ends up with a never-ending loop between “Glass on the table is.” and “Is the glass on the table.” (note the lack of a question mark.)
http://translationparty.com/tp/#765355
August 9th, 2009 at 10:08 pm“I do not like blueberry muffins.” becomes “AIRABU BURUBERIMAFIN.”
August 10th, 2009 at 12:04 amI found another infinite loop with the sentence, “People like to eat chicken, but chickens don’t like to be eaten.”
http://translationparty.com/tp/#783231
Where did the word “atom” come from in this, anyways?!
August 10th, 2009 at 4:14 amloop on “Ireland is green as grass”. Its wacky.
August 10th, 2009 at 9:36 ambears don’t drink beers but eat bees
I will, honey buzzard, I have been drinking beer at dinner.
August 10th, 2009 at 4:29 pmWonderful fun! I entered the famous line from “Cool Hand Luke”, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” and got “This failure to communicate.”, which is at least nicely self-referential. I also tried “If you ask me, all translation programs suck.” and got: If you are, please ask me to suck all the translation program. If the program asked to absorb all of the following translation. If all of the following translation is called to absorb part of the program. … and so on
August 14th, 2009 at 4:15 pmWow. The ones I’m putting in are coming out a bit dark:
->
and then
->
August 16th, 2009 at 2:45 amI know this is an old post, but I speak some Japanese and I must say, the translations on both sides are TERRIBLE–there’s as much broken Japanese as there is broken English. Really, I will never use Google Translate after seeing this.
September 10th, 2009 at 5:02 pm