Re: <nettime> until the text becomes ' produces ' the left sidewith us see...

[Karl-Erik Tallmo <tallmo@nisus.se>]

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 palæozoic 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




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   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

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