GOOGLE GENERATES POETRY, or ENROSC� ON YOURSELF LIKE A LOMBRIZ

I've been rappelling my way through the dense jungles and high peaks of South American websites lately in search of information on disasters (it's my job). My search has produced, among other things, several examples of the entertaining linguistic contortions produced by machine translation. As far as I can tell, translation software is not particularly well equipped to handle the disastrous grammar and scattershot syntax of web prose. Machine translation, I assume, takes as its baseline a fixed set of grammatical rules. What, then, is Google or Systran or Babel Fish supposed to do with the misprisions and misspellings that litter the internet? Idiomatic language can be dealt with and incorporated into translation software; on the other hand, people's tendency towards idiosyncratic, innovative and stupid uses of language must create a constant problem for the smart people who design these programs. Systran boasts that its thirty-years-in-the-making MT architecture solves many of the problems involved with ambiguities, but if you ask it to translate the sentence "America rules! France drools!" from English to French (see Amblus' entry featuring that very phrase), Systran will faithfully give you "Les regles d'Amerique! Les drools de France!", which translates back into the fascinating but non-committal "The rules of America! The drools of France!" Babel Fish will do the same. However, if you specify what it is that America rules and what France is drooling on, you're in business. Apparently these translation engines expect objects for their verbs, or they're left floundering like a timid bureaucrat - America rules what, exactly? Yes, France needs a bib, we understand, but - actually we don't understand. What are you talking about? Can you be a bit more clear? Please accept this botched translation in the interim. I'll be back to answer questions in thirty, I've got to go on an Arby's run - anybody want anything?

Anyway, I thought I'd share some excerpts from this surreal Spanish-English translation of a website on the history of the Yungay district:

The Yungay district lived eluding, avoiding the bulk.
Thus it died.

While the large city grew towards the East and the west, the Yungay district declared its humble independence, negative his pertinaz to grow, his affirmed but to age by force of other people's glories and own pains. It stipulated tiny codes of property, enrosc� on itself like a lombriz, elaborated his limits basing mysterious slogans, showing and hiding his inevitable origin of average hair. Who lived there, they knew with certainty from where they were, but never would know for sure from where they came, and much less where they would go to stop.

The working district of Mapocho was diluted, broke its lances in the commerce of San Pablo, seducer, provocante:

bookstores,
pharmacies,
zapater�as,
talabarter�as,
packings,
ironworks,
sastrer�as,
yerber�as,
it buys and sales,
furniture.

Impenetrable.

The rest of the article details the inevitable dissolution of the Yungay District, the decay of its working-class areas, its disappearance into "the immensity of Matucana". There a few stand-out lines that I feel compelled to include:

[T]he School of Veterinary medicine where one took to operate the kittens.

Academies of cut and preparation.

There a district of better hair although of imminent decay began.

Another thing is the long vertical streets, of which another day we will take care.

I'm in particular agreement on that last statement. Best to postpone consideration of vertical streets until Volkswagen has developed cars that can handle them. Especially when you're operating the kittens and you don't know where to go to stop.

OCCURENCE OF SEQUENTIAL SHUTDOWNS EFFECTED IN OPERATIONS OF COCKFIGHTING

The Fall 2002 issue of The Humane Society of The United States West Coast Regional Office (WCRO) Regional News newsletter leads off its report with the headline "One Cockfighting Operation Shut Down, Then Another". I can't quite put my mind around that sentence. Why not just write "Two Cockfighting Operations Shut Down"? Was the editor trying to emphasize the unique character and distinctive flavour of each cockfighting operation? Did he or she write a story about one cockfighting operation and forget entirely about the second until the last moment? I'll bet the original headline read "One Cockfighting Operation Shut Down, Then Another, But No More After That," and a negligent application of Adobe Acrobat fouled it up, and now we will never know the editor's true intentions, and one day historians will point to the headline and say that its origins are "shrouded in mystery," and that perhaps, with persistence and luck, evidence of further shut-down cockfighting operations will emerge, but that we should not trust to Providence, and only hard work and the cooperation of civilians will reveal the truth of the matter. Then the historians will get on a raft and set out in search of sunken continents, gibbering madly to each other as day after day the cruel sun burns their skin and bleaches the hairs of their beards.

PALINODE'S PALACE OF INCORRECT PLURALIZATIONS

one moustache - two moustache

one argument - two oogument

one cauldron - two big buckets

one Vin Diesel - two Vins Diesel, but

one Keanu Reeves - two Keanu Reevayim

parode - exode