Half a croissant, on a plate, with a sign in front of it saying '50c'
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Untranslator

ruminations on The Lunchroom of the Pharaoh's Slaves
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While watching a popsci documentary on muon detection in archaeology, I notice that one of the scientists/team-members wears a t-shirt, the front adorned solely by the words

"Garden Railway of My Favorite City".

Obviously, a rather clever bit of humour, and any local pointing a cameraphone at the English nonsense phrase receives a translation, entirely sensible in their own language due to vagaries and shortcomings in iTranslate. Wonderful. Oh how I laughed, having solved the mystery.

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Somehwat unrelatedly, proposed is a program/app that uses insider-level knowledge of common translation program algorithms to accurately deconstruct a machine-translation back to its input text.

Simply cut'n'paste the offending phrase into the "Wotchutalkin'boutWillis" untranslator app and get back either the original text, or another translation attempt - this time by the user's choice from more sophisticated translation programs/versions.

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Spoiler#1 : they found a new Great Pyramid chamber "the size of a 200 passenger aircraft", which linguistic practise begs repeated smacks upside the head, delivered appropriately.

Spoiler#2 : applying some google-fu, the back of the tee probably says "The High Line, NYC"

Spoiler#3: catchphrase in a vintage TV sitcom.

FlyingToaster, Jan 25 2018

Anything to do with this? https://www.urbande...an-decay/UD714.html
[pashute, Jan 25 2018]

Actually, this... http://www.pbs.org/...-the-great-pyramid/
[FlyingToaster, Jan 25 2018]

and this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Line
[FlyingToaster, Jan 25 2018]


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Annotation:







       How did high become garden. Something to do with Arabic or French?
pashute, Jan 25 2018
  

       It would be pointlessly cruel, demeaning, humiliating and gratuitously offensive to make fun of you simply because of your slightly imperfect command of English idiom, [pash].   

       Hahahahaha, what an idiot ...! Durrrr ....
8th of 7, Jan 25 2018
  

       Stop sniggering 8th, you didn't get it, either.   

       It looked perfectly reasonable at 4 am when it was posted.
FlyingToaster, Jan 25 2018
  

       I still don’t get it...
RayfordSteele, Jan 25 2018
  

       Semantic mappings between natural languages tend not to be bijective. Therefore your inside knowledge of the algorithm might tell you that, in a given context, both A and B map to X. So, given X in the output language, you can't reconstruct whether A or B was used in the input language.   

       Besides, for the example quoted, what's needed is not insider knowledge of algorithms but, rather, knowledge about New York, and what's hip this week.
pertinax, Jan 25 2018
  


 

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