Omnes Sancti et Sanctæ Coreæ, orate pro nobis.

Now Blogging Afresh at Ad Orientem 西儒 - The Western Confucian



Tuesday, June 14, 2005

The Tower of Babel Fish
Playing arond with the link to Babel Fish I came across on eclexys, I cut and pasted the Ave Maria in Korean from this blog's side-bar and let the site translate it into English. Here's what I got back:
    About Mary where the grace is full it is glad under smallness from! Week it is together in the woman to become luck, Tae public opinion son Jesus also it becomes luck, all! About Mary the Holy Mother thousand attentions, when us dying with recently, for our sinner it begs, from address. Oh it carried on shoulder.
Here's the Pater Noster, taken in English from the modern "Ecumenical English version" so as to avoid archaicisms, translated into Korean, and back into English:
    The new star in the heaven your name which it does to do and inside future life heaven with the thing in endurance our father you leans together inside you, it is. Us give the bread to us today everyday. We head and us when forgiving sin them, forgive our sin in us. From at the time of pretrial hearing if to except us, it transports us from evil. Hazard the kingdom, the force and honor are your thing, now and forever.
Obviously, this software has a long way to go and my job as a language teacher is still safe.

My bet is that language, like human beings themselves, is "beyond the complexity horizon," as one mathematician said, and that attempts at translation software, like the tower in the Book of Genesis, are doomed to fail.