Some time ago, the HB entry titled "multiphasic charge inverter," inspired me to use the Babelfish auto-translator to translate the entry into German and then re-translate the resulting German text back into English using the same auto-translator. To my mind, the results, and the corresponding results of others that followed, were highly entertaining.

Today, I read the HB entry titled "Mud Farm," which seems to share some of the spirit of the "multiphasic charge inverter" entry, and I was tempted to annotate the entry with another round trip translation of its contents. I demurred, since I feared the trick wouldn't be as interesting the second time.

But the whole thing made me think it would be fun to have an option on my browser which, when toggled ON, would automatically translate the current web page into a foreign language and back again. This would be irritating for normal use, but could be good for a quick laugh. Perhaps it could be rigged to do a 2x translation infrequently and at random, for a surprise effect (and refreshing the page would restore it to normal).

P.S., in the end, I couldn't resist, so here is the "Mud Farm" text translated round trip through German:

"Down in the mud gutter: a grain barley above swimming. This is not a harvest: far fewer difficult than that is. I do not strike for a core grain will on curtain. We bevoelkeren can this farm again animate: operate the water on a wheel of the toepfers for form; wake a hot morning up to find around considerable fields around us syringe grain (if all mud fled); inform even birds and continuous screws to participate in the Rebirth. I do not strike for a core grain will on curtain. Present technology and everything that, certainly. "
-- beauxeault, Feb 05 2001

Multiphasic charge inverter http://www.halfbake...20charge_20inverter
[beauxeault, Feb 05 2001, last modified Oct 05 2004]

Mud Farm http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Mud_20Farm
[beauxeault, Feb 05 2001, last modified Oct 05 2004]

babelfish translator http://babelfish.al...l.com/translate.dyn
This site does the translations. It even will translate an entire web page, but will not translate the result back into the original language. [beauxeault, Feb 05 2001, last modified Oct 06 2004]

(?) Automatic round-trip translation http://prague.tv/toys/retrans/
half baked, but not yet available as a browser button option [beauxeault, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 05 2004]

10x auto-round-trip translator http://www.tashian.com/multibabel/
First linked by briztolz in another idea. [beauxeault, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 06 2004]

English, to portugese, to german and back to english yields the best results.
-- bungston, Mar 26 2003



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