Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/05/04/the-weird-poetry-google-transl.html
…
Years later, the shattered remnants of humanity, huddled in deep caverns, realized that the harbinger of the singularity was when the machines began taunting them with disturbing poetry.
Sorry for inconvenience.
I cannot help it.
I’m sorry but I can not help it.
I will never forget you.
My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song.
If you’d like to hear it I can sing it for you.
I’m kind of surprised we didn’t get “never gonna give you up” somewhere in there.
“I’m sorry I do not have my clothes, I will never stop calling you” seem like good song lyrics, though.
“homoerotic death metal”
I’m getting more of a grindcore or power violence feel from the daddy cthulu cumshot one.
What were the to/from languages on that one? I can’t reproduce it.
I’m not sure. That was from the article.
I’m not finding much success in this.
I think someone cheated.
Which language was used as the input and which Unicode a-umlaut is it (if there is more than one)?
Anyway it doesn’t work for me:
This as Swedish:
lä! Cthulhu!
lä! lä! Cthulhu!
lä! lä! lä! Cthulhu!
gives me this as English:
leeward! Cthulhu!
leeward! leeward! Cthulhu!
leeward! leeward! leeward! Cthulhu!
Finnish.
no idea.
ETA: I’m able to reproduce it; be warned that that’s a capital I
, not a lowercase l
.
Finnish to English. Don’t know about the unicode values – a-umlaut created in Microsoft Word.
which is a shame
English: ‘Out of sight, out of mind’. to Russian and back translates perfectly which is a shame because there was a story about early machine translation that said that translating it back to English gave ‘Invisible idiot’
I was hoping for some machine humour.
Figured it out.
It’s Iä, not lä. It starts with an upper-case India, not a lower-case Lima.
Try translating “hamster” from English to Arabic. Then hit reverse translate. Congratulations, you just killed all the hamsters.
Inspiration, explanation and Talking Heads lyrics from Mark Libermann @ Language Log:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=32412
Still doesn’t work for me on Linux/Firefox with capital I followed by U+00E4 LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS.
Iä! Cthulhu!
Iä! Iä! Cthulhu!
Iä! Iä! Iä! Cthulhu!
Gives
IA! Cthulhu!
IA! IA! Cthulhu!
IA! IA! IA! Cthulhu!
At last something odd and repeatable.
Try it without so many exclamation marks.