Confusing automated translators.

[John J. Lee]

Alan Kennedy <alanmk at hotmail.com> writes:

> Dan Bishop wrote:
> 
> > The Babelfish translation is
> > 
> > "People, you polskazhite plz where to reach progu to
> > frizer(kazhet'sya, shorter must be into yekhe-shnik outdistanced)."
> 
> My favourite "phrase designed to mess up machine translation" (I'll
> bet there's one big long word for that in German) is
> 
> "Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana".
> 
> :-D
> 
> I'd love to hear of other similar phrases. And somehow I intuit
> there's people in this ng who know lots of them :-)
[...]

There are so many...

Matthew 25:35  I was a stranger, and you took me in.

In English, there are two obvious meanings (the second, which is
amusingly in almost exact contradiction to the real meaning, is only
obvious to a native speaker once somebody sufficiently perverse has
pointed out its existence ;).  Automated translation usually misses
both of them, of course.

What surprised me was *how many* possible interpretations of some of
these phrases there are: IIRC, one program extracted tens of subtly
different possible meanings from "Time flies...".


PS just to take things even further OT, does anybody remember the
words coined by Steven Pinker in one of his books (probably to
illustrate how English does something similar to German in forming new
words)?  One meaning "fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of
one's mouth", and another one which was, IIRC, some kind of
self-referential joke?  Couldn't find it in "The Language Instinct",
so I guess it must have been in "How The Mind Works", which I don't
have a copy of.


John