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Show HN: What happens when you translate phrases too many times?

nickcammarata.com

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Re: Show HN: What happens when you translate phrases too many times?

#3

Post by spiralganglion »

I highly recommend taking some poetry through this process. I also highly recommend taking the translation back to English after each other language, so you can watch how each translation changes it.

However, this is one case where Google's improvement of their algorithms make the outcome less interesting. I've watched it happen.

I record music as a hobby. In the past 6 years, I've recorded 24 albums in 24 different genres — many film and theatre scores, and "experimental" (groan-worthy term) electroacoustic music. When I'm not quite satisfied with lyrics that I've written, and instead want a can't-quite-put-my-finger-on-it weird mood, I use this exact technique. It translates what I've written into more idiosyncratic forms. There are chains of languages of which I'm most fond, particularly to/from Japanese (seems to be the weirdest of all the asian language translations — gives a lot of weird articles).

Re: Show HN: What happens when you translate phrases too many times?

#4

Post by rosser »

This is very similar to a minor plot-point in PK Dick's "The Galactic Pot-Healer." The protagonist is a typical Dick character, out of place in his world. His pastime is to use the language translation feature of the global computer system (which is appreciably less than perfect) to translate, and re-translate famous sayings and the like enough times to obscure the original, and then submit the mutated phrases to his friends, to see if they can guess the original.

Re: Show HN: What happens when you translate phrases too many times?

#5

Post by nhebb »

If you try if with just the European languages, the translation actually comes through pretty well. Adding Persian or one of the Asian languages is where things get messed up.

Which means... if you want to expand your market, you could probably provide sufficient support to European countries using Google translate to communicate with customers.

Re: Show HN: What happens when you translate phrases too many times?

#8

Post by nicklovescode »

zalew wrote: post #6

Fun and interesting project. Reminds me of http://www.translationparty.com/ You should totally enable linking to the language setups, now it's hard to share an interesting result.

That's a good idea! I'll see if I can do that tomorrow. It's 1:23am here and I have school tomorrow :(

Re: Show HN: What happens when you translate phrases too many times?

#9

Post by drivebyacct2 »

spiralganglion wrote: post #3

I highly recommend taking some poetry through this process. I also highly recommend taking the translation back to English after each other language, so you can watch how each translation changes it. However, this is one case where Google's improvement of their algorithms make the outcome less interesting. I've watched it happen. I record music as a hobby. In the past 6 years, I've recorded 24 albums in 24 different…

> I also highly recommend taking the translation back to English after each other language, so you can watch how each translation changes it.

That observation will change the translation though... Unless you went:

A -> Spanish(A) -> English(Spanish(A)) -> German(Spanish(A)) -> English(German(Spanish(A))).

Otherwise you'd be doing:

A -> Spanish(A) -> English(Spanish(A)) -> German(English(Spanish(A))) -> English(German(English(Spanish(A)))), etc.

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