There are many popular word games, such as Scrabble,
crosswords,
Pictionary, etc. These games are very entertaining, and do not
require the use of a computer.
The Translation Cycle Game differs in two respects.
It requires the use of any designated Internet translation site, such
as
Babelfish.
The player selects a language, and an English sentence
of
10 or fewer words.
They then use the translator to translate their sentence back and
forth to and from the chosen language repeatedly, until the results
(in English) start to repeat themselves. For example, starting
with
Japanese as the language and "He died with a carrot up his nose."
as
the sentence, we get:
He died with a carrot up his nose
He died the carrot on that nose
He died that nose of the carrot
He died that nose carrot
He died the carrot of that nose
He died that nose of the carrot
He died that nose carrot
This settles down to a cycle of three, beginning with the third
iteration, and hence has a score of 3+3 = 6
The objective of the game is to find the language/sentence
combination which gives the greatest score by this method.
This game is quite tedious.
Thanks to [Grogster] for unspiring this idea.